"Oregon is a landscape of brilliant waterfalls, towering volcanoes, productive river valleys, and far-reaching high deserts. It is also a land of stories. People have lived on the Oregon landscape for at least twelve thousand years, and during that time they have established communities, named places, built railroads, harvested fish and timber, and made laws that both protected and threatened the land. It is a history of commodification and conservation, of despair and hope, of progress and tradition. Oregon: This Storied Land tells many of those stories, giving us a broad, sweeping history of a state that has resisted being made into a stereotype. 'We live in a place rich with complex social, economic, cultural, and ecological meaning,' the author tells us, and then he proceeds to unravel the complexities and uncover the riches for us. Robbins writes in the introduction: 'This book attempts to remain true to a historian's commitment to critical inquiry, to interrogate the past with a critical lens, to raise uncomfortable questions, to approach Oregon's history with an open-mindedness and a healthy dose of skepticism about the claims of its boosters.' "