About This Book

One of the Most Important Battlegrounds in the History of America

While it is in the eastern United States where most Americans identify our military history, the vast, resource-rich Pacific Northwest, stretching from Northern California through British Columbia, endured a series of battles and wars over the course of the nineteenth century that were of regional and national importance. It was here where Great Britain and the United States had their final confrontation in the Americas, where Chief Joseph attempted to secure independence for the Nez Perce, and where the Oregon Trail marked the first great migration to the West of settlers bent on carving out new lives in the wilderness. The Pacific Northwest also saw some of the only attacks on the mainland by Japan during World War II.

Beginning with the earliest known accounts of wars among the American Indians of the region, Fighting for Paradise: A Military History of the Pacific Northwest describes early European contact, including British trappers of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Jedediah Smith, and John Jacob Astor’s trading post. The competition over the lucrative fur trade led to the “Pig War,” which almost resulted in another armed conflict between Great Britain and the United States, but it was the influx of settlers from the Oregon Trail that touched off the long bitter battles between whites and American Indians. Starting with the 1847 Whitman Massacre and the ensuing war it touched off, the book covers the next three decades of violence, ending with the Sheepeater’s War in 1879. Kurt R. Nelson then relates the Pacific Northwest’s contributions to the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, the Mexican Punitive Expedition, World War I, and finally World War II, where the region fought Japanese submarine attacks and was harassed by balloon bombs. Throughout, the author provides current information about the state of preservation of various battle sites and other points of historical interest. Accompanied by maps and photographs, Fighting for Paradise provides insight into an area of American military history, rich in drama, that is not generally known.

Kurt R. Nelson served in the US military, the Peace Corps, and in law enforcement. He has a BA in political science and history and an MA in public administration. He is the author of many articles and three books, and currently is a volunteer with the National Ocean Service and the National Park Service, where he serves as an interpreter. He lives in Central Oregon with his wife.

Praise for Fighting for Paradise:

“Nelson doesn’t idealize two sides in an epic struggle: evil  U.S. versus peaceful tribes, aggressor versus victim. Instead he leaves out much of the editorial, and seeks to humanize the history by showing the long chain of small disputes, misunderstandings, and treacheries on all sides . . . . The history of the Oregon country involves no small amount of good intentions and peaceable intentions on the part of the settlers and army that were overridden, more than anything, by the absolute chaos and greed and nervousness of the individual people—miners, militia volunteers, panicky settlers, politicking governors, tribal sell-outs, betrayed chiefs—and by the common inability of settlers to see the native tribes as anything but some threatening Other.”—Willamette Week