HERE ROLLED THE COVERED WAGONS BOOK

Fourteen years ago as a rookie traveling salesman I learned two sad truths that led to the creation of this book. As I paced the hotel room one Saturday afternoon, wondering if the day were going to last forever, my first disillusionment came. Those exotic adventures in which traveling men supposedly revel were dreamed up by the men themselves while they idled away lonely Saturdays and Sundays in a hotel room.

My two hobbies of photography and Northwest history came to my rescue. I remembered how as children my older sister and I listened to a Montana pioneer tell about the exciting early days; how we poked inquisitive fingers into bullet holes Indians had put in his log cabin during the Nez Perce War; how we peered for hours at yellowed newspapers that lined his walls. Then I thought of my father, Oliver M.

Salisbury, a pioneer in picture making, who experimented with and talked about photography so much that I named my first rag doll 'Togaphy.

That gave me an idea of how to kill those tiresome weekends.

Sunday morning I set out to photograph a monument that had interested me during the week. As I neared the site, my second disillusionment came. There had been a snowstorm the week before but not one single track had broken the white surface around the monument. Of the thousands of people who had whizzed by on that heavily-traveled road, none had been interested enough to turn off the highway and pause a moment to read the monument's inscription. Yet this was a place where many men had died to make the West-the very land where the heedless travelers lived. What a thankless task had been that of the historical society which had spent time and money erecting a marker! Then and there the need for a book telling how to get to these places and why they were important became apparent.

Since that day nearly every place of historic interest in the Pacific Northwest has been visited and photographed. In a few cases the picture never seemed quite right and I requested permission from others to use their photographs. They are listed on the page of acknowledgments. The hundreds of sites and the thousands of pictures that were taken presented a problem. To describe them all would take several

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