"'Skookum' is the startlingly original narrative rendering of the experiences of a prominent westering family from 1843 to the present. The remarkable story of the Applegate family encompasses many of the predominant themes of the early American West: the overland crossing via the old Oregon Tail in 1843, the quirky restlessness of Applegate men who, after reaching the 'promised land,' permitted their travel- worn families to rest only for a while, the effects of the intermit- tent gold rushes that continued to upset family lifre long after 1849, the troubled relations between the settler and the Indian ... Shannon Applegate is interested not only in what happemned to her family, but in what it meant to them. How did it feel to be a mother witnessing the death of her child on the way to Oregon, or to be a settler's son watching his Indian friends and old playmates rounded up in the dead of winter and marched off to the reserves? What did it do to the course of a young woman's life when she learned that her father has scratched her name from the family Bible? What sort of world was it where an old blue sugar bowl filled with gold dust could be unconcernedly set out in plain sight?"--From paper dustcover.