Isaac I. Stevens (2nd ed.)

“Isaac Stevens was most often in the center of activity, providing leadership, spewing out orders and ideas, shaping events, or creating controversy. He was a man either loved or hated.”--Kent D. Richards. Washington Territory's first governor remains as controversial today as he was to his frontier contemporaries during the Pacific Northwest's most turbulent era--the mid-1850s. Indian wars, martial law, and bitter political disputes, as well as the establishment of a new, sound governmental sys