Description: Minor shelf handling wear to pages, covers, and dust jacket with price in pencil on title page. See pictures for a better idea of content and condition. (Sorry for the poor uneven shading on some of the pictures - I should not have used fluorescent lighting to take the pictures.) OCR scan from some of the book: The Okanogan country of the Pacific northwest,straddling the Canadian-U.S, border, slopeswestward from the towering Cascade Moun-tains, spills into rich river valleys, and rolls eastto arid mesas and brown rangelands. Bountifuland fertile, it was a wildemess inhabited only bybands of Salish Indians and a handful of whitesuntil the mid-1880s, when homesteaders cameto vie with the Indians for land, miners to hackout riches from mountain veins of gold, silver,and copper. The wildemess had become a fron-tierIn 1903, a twenty-nine-year-old Japanese,Frank Matsura, stepped off the stage in Con-conully to take a job as cook's helper and laun-dryman at the Hotel Elliott. Matsura was welldressed and elegant; the former boom townwas barely surviving. With his warmth, intelli-gence, and remarkable photographic skills,Matsura was destined to becorne a respectedpart of the life of the Okanogan while creatingone of the finest and most moving collections ofhistoric photographs ever taken of the OldWestMatsura himself is a figure of mystery. Appar-ently well educated and from a sophisticatedand cultured background, he cast his lot withthe miners, merchants, farmers, ranchers, andIndians in a life that must have seemed as exoticfor him then as it is for us now. Such was hisplace in the community that when he died oftuberculosis in 1913, funeral services were heldin the town's auditorium because the churchwas too small to hold all the moumers. Morethan three hundred people, whites and Indiansalike, came to pay their respects. Why Matsuraleft Japan, why he came to this raw land, andmost of all, why he chose to live and die so farfrom his home remain unanswered questions.The search for the truth about Frank Matsuracontinues today in Japan. Here, for the first time, is a selection of thefinest of Matsura's work, photographs whoseexistence was almost unknown until their recentdiscovery by the Okanogan Historical Societyand by author JoAnn Roe, then writing a re-gional history. Selected from hundreds of flaw-less glass plates that had been preserved largelyby luck, and reproduced in duotone to retainthe precision and astonishing clarity of the origi-nals, 'these photographs linger in the imagina-tion: Indians posing in full regalia, cowboysclowning in Matsura's studio, solid citizens atplay. With rare understanding and intimacy,Matsura captures paddle-wheelers on the Col-umbia, ice-skating on the river, tennis against abackdrop of sagebrush-covered hills, picnics,parades, and parties, and behind all of it, townsemerging from the wilderness. JOANN ROE, author of the award-winning his-tory The North Cascadians, is an experiencedjournalist and photographer who lives inBellingham, Washington.MURRAY MORGAN is a distinguished writer andhistorian whose books include Skid Road, TheLast Wildemess, and One Man's Gold Rush. ITEDTAL paper that discusses the drowning of a Mr. Toda aboard a ship belonging to NipponYusen, Toda's employer. The clipping shows that Tode once tought English inKamamoto City High School in Kyushu Prefecture, Review of a list of the school'sgraduates does not uncover any Matsuura. However, there Is a Matsura (not Matsuura)family in Kyushu Prefecture, so rich and powerful and famous nationally, that there is aMatsura museum in Hirato. There was a Sakae among family members. Nothing hasbeen found, however, to connect Frank S. Matsura with this familyWhat we do know Is that Matsura photographed with consummate shill a period oftransition in the American-Canadian West, a time when the cultures of homestendersand Indlans overlapped and mingled. Because of its cloistered location, with a toweringmountain range to the west that inhibited intercourse with the urban centers of Seattleand Vancouver, the Okanogan country developed its own sociological and economicideas. While Matsura may have come as a spectator of frontler life, bringing his camerato record it, he stayed to become a part of its historyWhen Matsura died suddenly, his photographs, mostly on glass plates, went un-noticed for forty-one years. Having stored Matsura's effects after hls death, JudgeWilliam Compton Brown, his friend, opened the boxes of photographic materials briefin 1954 with the intention of cataloging them, But he did not do so. Sometime thereafterBrown gave certain of his own legal papers and research materials about Indian treatiesto the archives at Washington State University, Pullman, Washington. Included withthese papers was a part of the Matsura photographic collection.Upon Brown's death in 1963, most of his property and effects went to Eva Wilson,who had taken care of him for several years. One day in 1964. Wilson telephoned JudgeJoseph Wicks, Brown's friend and successor on the bench, and asked him about threeboxes containing pieces of heavy glass in the garage-what were they, what shouldshe do with them? Fortunately, Wicks remembered that Brown had retained a part ofMatsura's collection-the best part, as it turned out-and asked Wilson to tum themover to the Okanogan County Historical Society. This small group of volunteer histo-rians had no building, only a garage and orchard warehouse, to which the glass plateswere removed.When the society scrounged up sufficient funds to build a small museum at Okanoganin 1975, it rediscovered the Matsura collection among its other artifacts. Bruce Wilson,then publisher of the Omak Chronicle and a member of the Historical Society, selectedsome of Matsura's pictures to be enlarged for display in the museum. The Chronicleoffered to store the valuable collection at its relatively fireproof offices, and since then ithas had custody of the glass plates and negatives.In 1974, while searching for illustrations of early Okanogan events. I obtained a fewMatsura prints from the Okanogan County Historical Society for a book, The NorthCascadians (Madrona Publishers, 1980). At that time I filed a mental note to return anddelve into the mysterious Mr. Matsura's life more thoroughly. It was 1980 before I hadtime to do any sleuthing. The more I saw of his phutographs, the more I heard about theman himself, the greater was my conviction that here was an undiscovered photogra-pher of major importance. After seeing some of Matsura's prints and leaming aboutMatsura, Madrona Publishers of Seattle and Douglas & Mcintyre of Vancouver, B.C.enthuslastically agreed to publish the book internationally.For help in the search for Matsura's past, a person to whom I owe great thanks isThomas Kaase, Head of Reference Services, East Asia Library, University of Washington, who examined all the obscure lists and records known only to such a professionalThey might have revealed, but did not, something about Matsura's Seattle lifeI appreciate the research assistance of Masahiko Shima, Tateyama City, Chiba Prefec- ture Japan, who was a student in 1981 at Western Washington University, BellinghomWashington, and vetually an adopted memnber of our tamily He trarislated Japanesematerials and secured the help of hia father, Kazuhlto Shima, in Japan The latter madeseveral trips to Tokyo to investignte leads, and erilsted the help of the Japen Photogrephers Association in Tokyo. The association reported that there was a famous photogrepher in Nagoye in about 1900 named Metsura, but there is nothing to link Frank SMatsura with Nagoya Back home in Japan during the summer of 1981. Masahikocontinued his research and also contacted NHK. Nihon-Hoso-Kyokai, the JapanesePublic Broadcasting Association. I appreciate the help, too, of Arata Hayashi of Osaka,who is also wnth NHKThank you, Bll Hosokawa, columnist for the Pactfic Citizen, a Los Angeles news-paper with langely Japanese American readership, for writing about Matsura in anattempt to ferret out Informanon.I appreciate the cordial help of organizations in Seattle, which polled their most elderlymembers in a futile attempt to learn anything about Frank S. Matsura, or SakaeMatsuura -The Japenese American Citizens League, the Japan America Society ofSeattle, Inc., the Japanese Baptist Church and its pastor, Rev. Paul M. Nagano.For sharing personal reminiscences with me and in identliying situations and peoplein Matsura's photographs, special thanks go to ploneer Dora Storhow Meeker, who wasextremely helpful. I also appreciate the help of Addie Mitchell, Moses George, DorothyMinchell, Lillian Kaufman, Howard Lockwood, Bill Roberts, the late Sen. RobertFrench, Allce Irey, Judge Joseph Wicks, Ada LeMaster, Susanne Manuel, Margaret Gorr,Ruth Murray, Don Jaquish, Blanche McSwane, Fred Baines, Bernard Kaufman, RoseCox. Robert Gibson, and Carl Cleveland. Iacknowledge with special thanks the help ofJullanne Cecila Timentwa in identifying photos of Indian people. Personal knowledgeof early cowboys was furnished by Warren Dickson, and of grain farming by Ed McLean.My appreciation goes to Terry Abraham, Washington State University Archives, for hiscooperation. A speclal thanks to Charles Goodyear of the Okanogan County HistoricalSociety, who spent hours In the museum with me while I perused old newspapers.Thanks to Dennis Anderson, Northwest Collection, University of Washington; to JeanneCoberly, Seattle Public Library; to Margaret Ziegler, Linda Hodge, Gail Helgoe, JaneLawry and Bruce Radtke of the Bellingham Public Library reference staff. To myhusband, Emie Burkhart, goes my gratitude for his support and my appreciation for hisown fascination with the Matsura saga.A very special thanks to John E. Andrist, a talented photographer and member of theOkanogan County Historical Society, who made all but a few of the prints from theMatsura glass plates. It was a difficult and demanding job, involving work with fragileplates, some almost eighty years old. John became so engrossed in the task that he found himself talking out loud in the darkroom to Frank Matsura. JOANN ROE
Price: 32 USD
Location: Auburn, Washington
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Item Specifics
All returns accepted: ReturnsNotAccepted
Publication Year: 1981
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Book Title: The Real Old West Images of a Frontier
Author: JoAnn Roe, Frank Matsura
Narrative Type: Nonfiction
Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
Genre: Adventure, Antiquarian & Collectible, Art & Culture, Biographies & True Stories, Business, Economics & Industry, Farming, Geography, Historical, History, Imagery, Photography
Topic: American History, History, Frontier, Photography
Edition: First Edition
Number of Pages: 144
