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| Year | Stories |
|---|---|
| 1872 | 1 |
| 1876 | 6 |
| 1877 | 4 |
| 1878 | 1 |
| 1882 | 1 |
| 1883 | 3 |
| 1884 | 2 |
| 1885 | 7 |
| 1886 | 2 |
| 1888 | 3 |
| 1889 | 5 |
| 1890 | 1 |
| 1891 | 7 |
| 1892 | 8 |
| 1893 | 4 |
| 1894 | 1 |
| 1895 | 9 |
| 1904 | 1 |
| 1914 | 2 |
| 1915 | 1 |
| 1916 | 2 |
71 stories matching thunder
- Two Small Boys Run Away to Live in the Woods—With Muskets but No Ammunition
A pair of Olympia schoolboys declared independence and set up camp up the bay, but their lack of provisions and a father’s search brought them home.
- The Captain Who Caught a Monster: Seattle’s Own Sea Serpent Hoax
Captain Pat J. Boyton of Seattle claims to have captured a 63-foot sea serpent in the Pacific, sending a letter from his ship that has locals buzzing with wonder and skepticism.
- The Day the Cardinal Rode Through the Mud: A Historic Union of Northern and Southern Presbyterians
In a rare moment of post-Civil War reconciliation, thousands gathered in Seattle to witness the historic meeting of two Presbyterian Assemblies that had been divided by the Mason-Dixon line for decades.
- Seattle City Hall's Pay Cut Leaves a Hornet's Nest—and One Philosophical Engineer
Council slashed salaries, abolished jobs, and triggered charges of charter-reform politics.
- The Trickle-Down Fury of the Waterfront
A brutal hierarchy on a Seattle steamboat illustrates the chaotic and abusive nature of labor relations in the 1889 maritime trade.
- The Steamboat That Dared the Rapids
Captain James W. Troup pilots the steamer *Hasalo* through the treacherous Cascades of the Columbia River in a feat of navigation that thrilled onlookers and defied death.
- The Great Seattle Heatwave of 1876: Sunstroke Claims Lives as City Swelters
While the nation fixates on Custer’s Last Stand and political deadlocks in Washington D.C., Seattle is locked in a silent, deadly battle against an unrelenting July heatwave that is proving fatal to its residents.
- The Night Olympia Went to War — and Nobody Shed a Drop of Blood
A touring tragedian closes his engagement with six acts of Shakespearean murder, and the army court-martial in town turns out in force to watch.
- A Correspondent Reports on the Nez Perce Conflict
Writing from Olympia in 1877, a local correspondent describes Nez Perce leaders’ refusal to relocate and the surprise attack that sparked a war many understood as a defense of home.
- The Ring is Broken: Seattle’s Republicans Revolt Against the 'Corrupt' Delegate
In a stunning display of local defiance, prominent Seattle citizens and Republican leaders publicly repudiate Territorial Delegate George W. Gillette, accusing him of betrayal and corruption ahead of the 1873 election.
- A Squall Tore Through Seattle—and a Husband Saved His Wife from the Bay
A sudden storm knocked out telegraph and telephone wires, smashed windows, flipped wagons, ditched a shingle train, and nearly drowned a mill worker and his Native wife in Elliott Bay.
- The Day She Asked for Our Front Door
A Snohomish resident’s hilarious and exasperating account of his neighbors’ audacious borrowing habits reveals the thin veneer of civility in close-knit frontier communities.
- "My Idol Is Broken": A Governor Denounces a Senator to His Face
Miles C. Moore accuses John B. Allen of selling out an old friend to climb into the Senate, and prints the speech he says he delivered at Allen's headquarters.
- The Day the Sloop Fired on a Federal Cutter
In 1860, twenty-four Port Townsend citizens chartered a sloop to save $5 on fares to Olympia. When intercepted by a revenue cutter, their captain opened fire with a brass howitzer—only to discover he’d just threatened the U.S. government.
- The Engineer’s Ash-Box Ghost: A Tale of New Year’s Eve Peril
In a column dated October 1870, the Seattle Daily Intelligencer reprints a harrowing tale from an old engineer about surviving a wreck by hiding under his locomotive's ash pan during a blizzard.
- The Electric Gate: An Olympia Father Declares War on Front-Gate Courting
A gadget-minded Eastside householder wires his front gate to deliver a jolt to lally-gagging sweethearts — and proves it first on an unwitting dog and a cabbage-loving cow.
- The Vigilantes' Ghost: Seattle's Dark Secret in Two Maple Trees
A poem published in the *Seattle Daily Post-Intelligencer* reveals the city’s foundational myth: that its current 'peaceable' order was bought with the blood of six men hanged by a secret committee when the law failed to act.
- Canoeing the Queets: Promise and Dispossession on the Olympic Peninsula
An 1892 travelogue celebrates homesteaders in the Queets River valley while arguing that Native hunters should be confined to the reservation.
- They Climbed Rainier First—and Slept in a Sulphur-Scented Ice Cave
In 1870, Hazard Stevens and P. B. Van Trump reached Mount Rainier's summit after a brutal 10½-hour climb, then spent a freezing night beside volcanic steam vents.
- A Christmas on the Ice King: The Climb That Saw Rainier Smoking
In 1894, Major Ingraham led six men, seven homing pigeons, and a camera onto Mount Rainier’s glaciers. They came back with frostbite, a story of steam and smoke rising from the crater—and one pigeon missing.
- The Missing Will That Would Have Given Seattle a Library
Henry Yesler's widow and two doctors are arrested, accused of burning a will that left the pioneer's fortune—and his mansion—to the city.