Visible Bones

How can you know a place? Historian and naturalist Jack Nisbet—author of Sources of the River: Tracking David Thompson Across Western North America—looks to the relics of a region to connect the present moment to the distant past. In the vast Western territory defined by the Columbia River, Nisbet tracks the stories and meaning of relics such as a trilobite fossil that points to a tropical prehistoric ecology; the nearly extinct California condor, once the largest thing in the skies,