The Lost History of Pullman, Washington – Part 1

by Gracjan Kraszewski (February 2026)

 

 

Part I

I’m holed up at Brused Books, ‘Purveyors of Chair Traveling.’ Brused Books in downtown Pullman, Washington on the left side of Main Street, heading west, where you can find Pizza Perfection, The Black Cypress, and B&L Bicycles shop. I am lying on the ground in one of the middle aisles labeled ‘romantic mystery thriller cookbooks.’ Three times the girl at the front desk asked me if I needed help and each time I said ‘no.’ After I told her ‘no’ the third time, she told me she was twenty two years old, from Walla Walla, and working part time as a dogwalker slash social media coordinator for four businesses here in Pullman. Jane Austen is her second favorite author. She returned a fourth time, saying, ‘could you, um….could you, like, um, could you like get off the floor because, um, the manager said that … that it would like, um, not, like not be good for um business to have someone just, um, lowkey lurking in one of the aisles.’

I’d rather stay, I said, almost pleading. It’s a form of self-care. My therapist told me the cure-all to all that ails me would be to spend an entire day at a used bookstore laying down in the aisle beneath the books I found most challenging and inspirational. I am supposed to do this at least twice per month.

‘Um, uh, hold on,’ she said. ‘I’ll …. um, ask my manager, wait.’

She returned no more than two minutes later.

‘Yes. You can, um, you can like stay as long as you like.’

I thanked her.

She walked away.

So, here I am.

***

Today is the Fourth of July. I say this for the historical record recording. Today is July 4th, 2025, Friday. The outside temperature is 86 degrees Fahrenheit. There is not a cloud in the sky. There are a few other customers in the store. I have been here for more than an hour. I have checked a few times that the historical record recording is, in fact, recording. It is recording. Confirmed a fifth time. Yes, Brused Books is open on the Fourth of July. They are closed on Tuesdays. Today is a Friday.

I am here.

My name is Harold Blye-Tornado. I was born on February 14, 1990. I am 35 years old. I am 5 feet 11 inches tall and I weigh 181 pounds. I am ‘doctor’ to my students; Dr. Harold or Dr. Tornado the most popular iterations. When I order coffee, I tell them to put HBT on the order. To women on dating apps, it’s always Harry. When I made one of my usernames ‘Another Prince named Harry’ it got me more dates, but every woman who went out with me was upset when learning that I was not a prince. I have since deleted that app from my phone. In high school, my basketball nickname was HGT. ‘Hyperdrive Geeknozzle Tornado.’ One game, I missed three easy lay-ups by, basically, firing the ball off the rim from close range. One miss ricocheted three rows up the visiting fans’ bleachers. I heard the ref mumble something under his breath and his face had this unmistakable look of disappointment, like he was my uncle or dad.

I was born Josephstalin Jones. My parents were hardcore Soviet Union fanatics. Both born in 1910—my birth at age 80 quite the surprise for my mom, who got a 60 Minutes special out of the deal entitled ‘the Ancient Woman of America’ —they had grown up in the Golden Age of American socialism. Eugene Debs’ name was spoken with a hushed tone in my house, with respect, whereas even Franklin D. Roosevelt was considered right wing and ‘probably crypto-fascist.’ My mom made me do a show and tell presentation on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in second grade. The theme was the heroes of American history. My presentation included mention of how the pope at that time, Pius XII, had unsuccessfully intervened on behalf of the Rosenbergs with the U.S. government. My father once said, ‘even if they were guilty, Eisenhower making two orphans to prove a point is a greater crime than had the USSR blown up half the world.’ My parents raised me without religion, but in my boyhood home Pius XII was a name held next to Debs’ in esteem.

My parents died, together, at the age of 96 in the year 2006. I was sixteen years old. They had gone on a vacation in Russia that included a submarine trip on an authentic 1950s USSR sub to the bottom of Lake Baikal. Maintenance was long past due. The sub never surfaced. I went to live with my uncle Rick-Tom Hickstick Jones in Moscow, Idaho. That’s how I originally came to the Palouse. I changed my name that summer to Harold Blye-Tornado, having just read Harold Bluestein’s excellent book Tornado Alley: Monster Storms of the Great Plains. The ‘Blye’ part was a personal indulgence. It sounds kind of like blue eyes and I always wished I had been born with blue eyes not brown.

I attended Moscow High School from tenth through twelfth grade. Uncle Rick-Tom’s farm on Highway 8 towards Troy was spacious and there were lots of animals to play with and he took me fishing at Dworshak Reservoir every now and then. To this day, few dishes can compete with my Aunt Betty Crockpot’s raspberry cobbler a la mode. Rick-Tom and Betty met at a EDP (Electronic Dance Polka) music festival in Indianapolis many years ago, eloped, and settled in Idaho. They have four boys: Dale Earn-Datmoneyhard, Tracy Big-Bird, Jose Cuervoball, and Elvis Sinatra. They’re like brothers to me.

I always appreciated and enjoyed the small-town charm of Moscow. Even now—knowing the real, lost history of Pullman, Moscow, all the Palouse—it doesn’t change the memories. Strolling aimlessly through the Fort Russell District beneath trees looking at the handsome houses; the Co-op downtown, the pastries in particular; Main Street and its shops, in and out of season relative to the May-October Farmer’s Market; Vandal football games in the Kibbie Dome; a spacious Arboretum right off a dirt road called Sand Rd. that takes you back to Pullman.

Every now and then I’d walk over to Friendship Square in downtown to watch people argue and yell at each other while they held signs. My favorite was a debate about whether or not America is a good country. Those in opposition chanted slogans such as

 

hey, hey, hey, schmuck/
ho, ho, ho, America sucks.
hey, hey, hey, Mr. Hillbilly Truck/
ho, ho, ho, America sucks.

 

Those in support sang patriot songs like the Star-Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful. The chorus was consistently off key and produced a sound that resembled frightened chickens being eaten alive by a leash of foxes. I remember one young woman with a truly horrifying voice singing louder than all the others. She thought the lyrics to America the Beautiful were

 

O beautiful, for David’s eyes/
for Amber’s made him pain.
for purple mountains mappingly/
above the rooted fame!
America, America…’

 

She pronounced America ‘Url-more-ika,’ emphasis on the first syllable, which she drew out as if yelling at a man named Earl.

I was a junior at Moscow High and I was conscious then, as it was happening in real time, that this was the most embarrassing thing I had ever seen. Conscious that it was possible to obliterate any and all credibility you might have had before ______. Conscious that it was possible to observe a debate, a fight, a contest of whatever kind, and hate and pity both sides. The embarrassment grew in proportion to the sun’s heat until a man not identifiably partial to either side walked into the fray and disrobed down to nothing but his socks and started dancing. Police arrived not long after and arrested him. The crowd dispersed. I thought he should have been given the key to the city. At least a simple thanks, a handshake, and a $10 gift certificate to an ice cream parlor.

I played football at Moscow High and was the starting quarterback from the fifth game of my sophomore season on. I am certifiably fast. People do not understand how to understand speed. They’ll watch the NFL combine and see a slew of guys running 4.38, 4.39, 4.45, 4.41, and so on, and assume this is some kind of average output. Most people in the world would be hard pressed to run it in less than five seconds. If a random guy off the street put down his caramel macchiato and ran a legitimate 4.92 40, I’d declare that guy a real athlete, full stop.

In high school, I ran between 4.59 and 4.66 seconds on a consistent basis. These are official, track-digital timing times. My friend Tony the Tiger Tinytim once hand timed me at 4.12 after practice but he’s an idiot and I put zero stock in that. He once had a friend drop a microwave on him from a second story window for the hoped social media clout. I couldn’t throw the football well, didn’t read defenses well, but my speed was, relative to the competition, overwhelming. I once carried the ball 17 times for 286 yards and five touchdowns in the first half of a game. My senior year we beat the Pullman Greyhounds 28-10 in Pullman and I scored all four touchdowns including a 92 yarder on the second play from scrimmage. The PHS head cheerleader proceeded to dump her boyfriend so she’d be free to ‘text and talk with’ me. People pretend it’s not really like that, but it is. Nothing came of it.

After high school, I enrolled at big time SEC school to play football and study history. You’d recognize it immediately. I don’t want to brag. I left for there, and then was there for a little while, but then I came back. To Pullman, on the Palouse. I’m here now, probably for the long haul. Like I said, I’m here. Brused Books, on the floor, pretending to pursue my mental health but, in reality, doing something else. I promise I’ll explain it all soon. This is the process of explanation.

One of this SEC school’s football coaches, offensive quality control, if I remember correctly, came out to the Jones farm on a recruiting trip and spoke to my uncle Rick-Tom and my Aunt Betty Crockpot using phrases like ‘solid athlete’ and ‘a potential piece of the puzzle’ and ‘could make a contribution down the line.’ What struck me as peculiar during this meeting—the four of us sitting in lawn chairs out in the front yard, my uncle shirtless, my aunt wearing her wedding gown, around a charcuterie board of Marlboro cigarettes, a few tins of Kodiak long cut, Chick-Fil A Spicy Chicken Sandwiches still in the wrapper, piping hot, and little bowls of Skittles and travel size Snickers and Milky Way bars—was that the coach had his hands down the back of his pants the entire conversation. It looked uncomfortable to sit that way, on his folded hands, but he did.

My aunt and uncle shared the story of how they met. The coach said he had been married for 15 years and his wife was his best friend. My uncle said you can always tell the character of a man by the way he shakes your hand and whether or not he looks you in the eye. The coach said that most people were not aware of the fact that you could get athlete’s foot on your butt. Aunt Betty said it sure was a shame, wasn’t it? ‘What was,’ my uncle asked. Aunt Betty said she didn’t know, she had forgotten. ‘Well, so what do you say then?’ the coach asked the three of us. ‘Harold: how would you like being a (SEC school team’s name) quarterback?’ I signed my letter of intent that afternoon. A partial scholarship with two years of school fully paid for up front.

My college football career lasted one day of full pads practice, exactly one play. I ran a triple option to the right with the fourth stringers and did not pitch the ball to my tailback. Rather, I cut inside and up field and was immediately met at the line of scrimmage by starting linebacker Animalfarm Drunkenparty—he a returning all-conference player who was a legitimate NFL prospect, he of a tattoo that read I HAYT BAYTA MAILS. He the guy who, when teammates commented on the fact that the purposeful misspelling made it funnier, asked them what was misspelled. ‘No, really, what? Why is that funny, what are you guys talking about?’—who put his helmet, at full speed, into my left side and broke two ribs. I peed my pants on the field, cried, and quit the team.

Credit to ______ football, they kept their end of the bargain on the two years of paid education. I got a job my last two years of college at the furniture store in town. 25% of my time was spent helping load and unload furniture. 75% was spent in the backroom offices listening to late 40s men talk about their wives, hunting, trucks, politics, and conspiracy theories. One guy was convinced fast food drive-thrus were how the _______ and _______ governments stole American credit card information. I graduated summa cum laude with a 4.12 GPA, thought of Tony the Tiger Tinytim and that fake, but same number 40 time and laughed at life’s coincidences. Not long after, I began graduate studies at _________ University, a first rate, R1 Research gem somewhere east of the Mississippi River, not too far from New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore and our nation’s capital.

I earned my PhD in six years. I initially wanted to study the Napoleonic Wars. I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace my sophomore year at _______ U, in a class called ‘Fiction and Historical Connections.’ This became the first step towards my senior thesis, a comparison of Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia with Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa one hundred and twenty-nine years later. Graduate school was a whole different level of historical analytics. Three weeks into my second year, my advisor called me to his office and said he wanted me to focus on groundhogs.

‘Groundhogs?’ I asked.

He motioned for me to step behind his desk and showed me a set of directions pulled up on a website. A tick over 300 miles, he explained, that’s the distance from _________, _________ to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.

‘Do you understand?’ he asked me, the two of us looking at the screen.

‘No,’ I said.

‘I want you to make this your entire focus going forward, okay?’

I did not understand so I just looked at him and said nothing.

‘What’s your course load like this semester?’ he asked.

‘I have Fundamentals of Bloviating Jackassery with Professor Willie Winner-Williams, The Environmental History of Adams County, Iowa with Professor Girlnahuh Yougogirl and,’ I paused and bit my lip. ‘Basically just preparing for my master’s comps besides that. Oh, Tuesday night I have Inverted Critical Theory of Silent Films Made by Short Women with Professor Helga Grimhilde.’

‘What years?’

‘…’

‘There are four sections of that course. Silent Films Made by Short Women, 1896-1902; 1902-1909; 1909-1919; and the 1920s. Professor Sally Snoewhite teaches the advanced, ABD-only offering.’

‘She does? I thought Professor Ariel Halffish did.’

‘She’s no longer with the school. I can’t say anything more. HR policies and directives….’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Got it. 1909-1919, the third level. I had pre-reqs that exempted me from taking the first two.’

‘Which were? The pre-reqs, which courses?’

‘Appalachian Pillow Talk 200 and How to Present a Conference Paper if you haven’t showered in a Week and Smell like it. We actually had to live that out, the second one. It was a full immersion course.’

‘With Professor Porta-Potty?’

‘Yes. But I think he changed his named to Portable Toilet, officially. There was a feature article in the student newspaper.’

‘Okay, yes, you’re right. Our beloved Doctor Peter I’mso-SlapHappy Creaky Squeaky ExtraordinarilyMcReek-stinky Outhouse Portable Toilet. Yes. So, like I was saying, I want you to really focus on groundhogs going forward. We’ll get you set up with a summer fellowship with an affiliated thinktank in Punxsutawney. You rework your master’s thesis to include this research and then really make it the focal point of your doctoral program. I really think there’s potential here.’

‘…’

‘You don’t seem as excited as I thought you would be.’

‘I just don’t understand the nature of this research.’

‘You try to actually get inside the groundhog hole and then go whole hog. You mentioned full immersion. That sounds like full commitment to me. Think of yourself like scholarly special forces if you want. Fatass Punxsutawney Phil comes out of his hole, oh, excuse me, excuse me, his “burrow” once a year and, big deal!, his stupid face is all over the national media. What’s he up to the other 364? You’re going to find out. If you do half the job I think you’re capable of—

‘What does “go whole hog” mean?’ I asked him.

‘‘It means you study him with indefatigable dedication to detail. It will be the greatest exposé in American history.’

 ***

I spent large portions of the next four years in and out of subterranean groundhog holes in West-Central Pennsylvania. I once screamed at a guy in a bar in Pittsburgh because he said groundhogs and marmots were exactly the same. My revised dissertation became the book Out of the Darkness I first feel the tiny Teeth. It was published by a major University Press in the Northeast United States and was runner up for the Francis Parkman Prize. ‘Quite the debut,’ my advisor told me. ‘You’ve made larger waves than anyone could have imagined. Well done!’

The prize committee selected the following passage as a prime example of my book’s quality, especially relative to ‘contributing positively to the historical conversation and pushing ahead the boundaries of research potentialities.’

 

And so I lay here all alone in the darkness again. Day eight hundred and twenty six. Or, has this all been a dream? Is this real? Am I real? What is the reality of the real, the superstructure of the real beneath and above reality’s real or imagined interplay with contingent factors of agency and inertia and….oh, shit….no, no…dammit! They’re biting me on the ass again! No, wait, no, I can’t move, I can’t see, it’s pitch black….no, shit, shit…..shit!!!

 

The University of the Palouse-Pullman branch campus (their main, flagship campus is in Palouse, Washington itself, not too far from Kamiak Butte) was advertising a tenure track professorship in their history department. I applied. I returned to Pullman a finalist for the job. We had dinner at Black Cypress. They offered me the job before dessert arrived. ‘Just, look, Harold,’ the department head told me, ‘the one thing we need you to understand, if you accept, is that we don’t do that shit you did back East here, okay?’

‘Excuse me?’ I said, smiling as I sipped on my beer.

‘Groundhogs,’ he explained. ‘The groundhog bullshit. The other courses on your transcript, them too. “The Forgotten Ballads of Metrosexual Manhattan;” “Graduate Seminar in Underrepresented White Rappers.” This is a serious university. We are a serious history program. We love your work and writing, the potential and pure talent of it, we just want you to teach and research in a totally different direction than what you’ve been doing in graduate school. Are you okay with that?’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘We want your course load to be an American and European hybrid. Two classes each semester, one and one. Imagine, a course on post-Civil War America up to the First World War paired with a freshman survey on the French Revolution through the Revolutions of 1848, something like that.’

I couldn’t believe my ears. I’m sure my smile betrayed whatever aloof front I wanted to affect. For six years I had longed to break free from bottom-up agencies, contingencies, micro-histories of trivial data and minutia, assorted lenses ever narrower and more obscure; groundhogs. I still have not tasted crème brulee so good as the one I ate that night at Black Cypress.

 *** 

That was in the spring of 2018. I began my career as a UP-Pullman professor that fall. Mike Leach was still the head football coach at WSU across town. I earned tenure and promotion to Associate Professor last year, 2024. I liked my colleagues the day I met them. I like my students. The department head, same guy from the Black Cypress dinner, great guy. Most do good work, my students, some excellent. Few are pretentious douchebags and that’s a positive. Fewer still are morons. All in all, the time here has been splendid and perhaps I’m lucky or perhaps this is not the norm or, I don’t know. It’s the truth. But then maybe I do not know what ‘truth’ means anymore because everything changed beginning in late August 2020.

Things were crazy during the Covid pandemic, everyone’s nerves were a bit frayed. I had friends on both ends of the spectrum. One guy wouldn’t get vaccinated because the vaccines contained microchips by which Davos oligarchs could ‘control your mind, empty your bank account, make you hate meat, and force you to vote Democrat.’ One guy got vaccinated every day for a month straight just to ‘be as safe as possible.’ Not to be outdone, his best friend got vaccinated 8 times in one day and walked around triple masked only allowing himself to be double masked when showering and sleeping. I, myself, was then getting ready for my third school year on the Palouse. I was preparing syllabi for ‘Introduction to the Southern Gothic Novel’ and ‘Europe’s Place in the Sun: the Scramble for Africa, the Fin de Siècle, and the Outbreak of the First World War’ when it felt like it was all getting a bit tedious, and I was tired, and so I left my apartment, hopped on my bike, and took the Bill Chipman trail the full seven miles into Moscow.

I parked my bike next to the Kibbie Dome and laid down on the grass and stared up at the sky. It was a lovely night, warm, sunset was not too far away. Some birds or bugs were either chirping or buzzing and I thought I might just close my eyes and fall asleep. If I slept through the night, so be it. I adjusted my head and closed my eyes and then felt the tap on my shoulder.

A man dressed in a blue cleaner’s outfit, like a janitorial version of medical scrubs,  introduced himself as ‘Count Ken of the Kibbie Dome.’ He insisted I follow him inside the dome and that he would not take no for an answer for, indeed, two if not three times I told him that I was just resting here from a nice bike ride and I had to be back in Pullman soon. Thanks, but no thanks. He insisted. I relented. We entered through a side door on the lower west side. He flipped a switch, just one, and all the lights in the stadium came on at once. We stood there, on one of the sidelines near the thirty-yard line, and looked and said nothing until he said, ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’

I agreed, it was beautiful.

‘This is my Field of Dreams,’ Count Ken said. ‘If you build it, they will come. No, no, if you build it, he will come.’

‘Who’s they? Who’s he?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. Shit if I know. But I know I believe.’

‘Believe what?’

‘You gotta believe,’ Count Ken said, now shaking my shoulders with both his hands. ‘Damnit, I tell ya. Ya gotta believe. Maybe it’s love, you believe in love, or maybe it’s the sound of hogs being hogs, or the way your pencil drags across a piece of paper as you dot Is and cross Ts.  Maybe you believe in democracy, dictatorship, political polls, or the Postal Service. Maybe you believe in believing.’

‘What does this have to do with why we’re here?’

‘I told you I didn’t know. I have no idea. But, come on. This way.’

We took an elevator to a dark shaft housing ‘a secret elevator’ and took that one down, down, down for what felt like at least two or three minutes. I am not easily, or usually, scared but I certainly was at that moment. Why I had followed the man up to this point I cannot tell you. I don’t know. We reached the bottom, got out, and stood in front of a door labeled, I kid you not, SUPER TOP SECRET: CONFIDENTIAL AND CLASSIFIED.

I looked at Count Ken. He shrugged. The elevator we had come down on had already gone back up. It was cold. It was dark. Count Ken knocked on the door. Nothing, He tapped ever more aggressively as if expecting someone to open the door. Nothing. He kicked the door hard and then harder and then fell to the ground, crying, shouting that he had broken his foot and ‘now we’re really cooked!’ It was at that point that I became very scared. The thought that I would never emerge from a room hundreds of feet below the Kibbie Dome felt reasonable, probable.

But Count Ken got up, laughing, and told me ‘Sorry. I was just messing with you, ya know, havin’ a little fun.’ He then pulled out a pair of keys and inserted them into a keyhole I had not noticed before. The door opened and we walked into what appeared to be a grand hall. It was like the entire Library of Alexandria had been preserved, intact, underground. ‘Behold,’ Count Ken said, arms outstretched. ‘The Lost History of Pullman, Washington.’

When I asked why it was housed here, in Moscow, Idaho, he explained that anyone from either Pullman or Moscow knew that it was really all the same thing here, these cities, these schools, they’re just ‘the Palouse’ more than anything else and the quicker you accepted that, the better off you’d be. Also, he explained, we were then just standing in one room of a massive underground labyrinth, that did, in fact, stretch all the way back to Pullman. The Bill Chipman Trail I had ridden in on was directly above a seven-mile subterranean hallway, twenty-one feet wide, leading to four different ‘research libraries’ beneath Pullman. One underneath WSU’s Bear Center; one beneath Ferdinand’s Ice Cream shoppe; one beneath the baseball diamond at Kruegel Park; a final one at Lawson Gardens on Pioneer Hill, the entrance point beneath the seafoam-teal colored water tower one can see from as far off as Kamiak Butte.

Since the initial trip, I have visited the Lost History of Pullman archives 237 times. I know them better than anything else in the world. Count Ken gave me a key and the secret elevator access code after the third visit. He stopped accompanying me after visit number seven saying, ‘Remember that Field of Dreams stuff I told you about the day we met? I’m convinced you’re the one who was supposed to come. You’re in charge now, Dr. Tornado. I salute you, sir.’

I know all the entrance points to the archives. One beneath Monica’s coffeeshop on Deakin Street in Moscow, another beneath the Brown Rd. sign on the Old-Moscow Pullman Highway, these but two of twenty-seven in sum. Six of twenty-seven that you know about counting the four Pullman ones I just mentioned, the Lawson Gardens one dropping you 228 feet into a special collections section dealing with 15th century Pullman poets.

I made an archeological discovery during a midnight excursion that found a fifth grand research library in Pullman, 276 feet beneath the Reaney Park pool. The doorway was caved in and blocked by about ten feet of accumulated rubble. Count Ken and two other guys, Fatslob Frankenstein and Count Chocula-Davis, planned the excavation. A team of twenty skilled workers, including what Ken told me were the ‘legendary and esteemed’ Billy Bob Cornhole, Truckbutt Smith, and Dilapidated Dandelion Dan, broke through and opened the door and cleared the room and dusted the artifacts to a near spotless condition. Therein, amongst other interesting finds, are thousands of American Civil War era letters, correspondence between the Cougarius Dynasty and both the Union and the Confederacy penned between May 1861 and December 1864.

***

So, I am here, lying on the floor of the romantic mystery thriller cookbooks aisle at Brused Books in downtown Pullman having finally completed my research and ready to write my book, to tell the story of the Lost History of Pullman. Whether the world is ready to hear this or not, I do not know. But I must tell it. I have come to believe that Count Ken was right. I was meant to come to the Kibbie Dome that fateful night. It was me all along. This, I believe. I am here, lying down, speaking this book into my historical record recording device. Let’s call it a phone. Thank you for listening. I’ll label the chapters of this book by way of Roman numerals. When you hear them, you’ll know this is it, the Lost History of Pullman, Washington. Otherwise, all other errata and background noise and simple lived life in real time and et cetera, well, if you want to imagine that as being signified and or represented by normal numbers, ‘Arabic numerals,’ go for it.

What wonders I have discovered these past five years. It’s hard to know where to begin, but I will do my best. You will learn about the aforementioned Cougarius Dynasty, in particular the great King Butch Cougarius IV, and his conquest over the Fratbro Empire at the Second Battle of Colfax in 1742. You will learn about the true founders of Pullman, the Florentine Pier-Pietro Mangiatore di Zucche and his French wife Marie avait-un Petitagneau, who settled here in the fall of 1340, approximately 550 years before the ‘official’ founding as noted in the ‘official narrative’ of which I will soon discuss. You will learn about the usurper Daniel Drillbutton, the Four Monks of the Pullman Hills, the ‘Lost and Future King’ Butch Cougarius IX, the Epoch of the Great Football Coach Philosopher-King, and the Great Cataclysm of August 26, 1887.

But first, Pullman’s accepted history, for context.

I am here, on the floor at Brused Books.

It’s recording. Today is July 4, 2025. My name is

Doctor Harold Blye-Tornado.

I am here. This is

The Lost History of Pullman, Washington.

This is chapter one.

Roman numeral…

 

Table of Contents

 

Gracjan Kraszewski is the author of 6 books, novels Thermonuclear Mirth, Mark and Anna: Models, The Holdout, and Seraphim and the Dust Plague, as well as the book of essays, The Hippo Lectures; the Civil War history and Catholic Confederates. He has a PhD in history. Gracjan’s fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Amsterdam Quarterly, New English Review, Idaho Magazine, Riddle Fence, The Journal of Southern History, The Polish Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Eclectica Magazine.

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