Mossback

Who Was Paul Bunyan For?

The legendary lumberjack has been central to American identity. But who does he really represent?
Over the course of the past two centuries, tall tales of Paul Bunyan have stretched across North America, from the frigid woods of the East Coast all the way to the Pacific. With his ax and his ox Babe, the legendary lumberjack is said to have single-handedly shaped the continent. 
That was all fiction, of course. Much of the landscape that Bunyan is credited with creating was here long before any white man with an ax showed up. And the forces that would actually reshape the land in the 19th and 20th centuries consisted of multitudes, many of them felling trees in the Pacific Northwest.
Knute Berger touched on this history in a recent episode of his Mossback’s Northwest video series, but there is much more to discuss. 
For this episode of the Mossback podcast, Berger and co-host Sara Bernard dissect the folklore and ask why, exactly, Paul Bunyan was created, who did he serve and what we should make today of a legend that ignores the history and people that came before it. 
Before listening, we suggest you watch the original Mossback's Northwest episode about Paul Bunyan here. 
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Credits
Hosts: Sara Bernard, Knute Berger
Editorial assistance: Mason Bryan
Executive producer: Mark Baumgarten

Where Did All the Sea Monsters Go?

Headlines about sea creatures were once a regular occurrence around the Salish Sea. We take a deep dive into local lore.
When it comes to cryptids, there is one creature that puts the Pacific Northwest on the map: Sasquatch. But Bigfoot hasn’t always had a monopoly on mysterious sightings in the area. Sea monsters long inspired horror and fascination around the Salish Sea and on the Pacific Coast. 
Large creatures in the waters of the Northwest are depicted in Indigenous artworks from precolonial times, and frontier newspapers regularly carried tales of frightening sea creatures. The tales continued well into the 20th century. As recently as the 1960s, Seattle residents claimed to have seen a sea monster in the waters of Lake Washington. But if not monstrous beings, what were people seeing? 
That is a question that host Knute Berger touched on in a recent episode of his Mossback’s Northwest video series, but there is much more to discuss. 
For this episode of the Mossback podcast, Berger and co-host Sara Bernard unearth some of the region’s many sea monster headlines and discuss how mysterious the ocean really was before oceanography and resource exploitation made the creatures of the deep more familiar.
Before listening, we suggest you watch the original Mossback's Northwest episode about sea monsters here. 
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Credits
Hosts: Sara Bernard, Knute Berger
Editorial assistance: Mason Bryan
Executive producer: Mark Baumgarten

Why D.B. Cooper Won’t Disappear

A closer examination — with more theories — of the case of the world’s most famous mile-high bandit.
On the afternoon of Nov. 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper boarded a Seattle-bound 727 in Portland, with plans to pull off what would become a historic heist. Later that night, the man leapt from the plane with $200,000 in hand and, presumably, a parachute on his back. He was never heard from again. 
Yet the story of that high-flying crime has been told innumerable times, turning the man who became known as D.B. Cooper into a kind of folk hero. Now, 50 years later, the questions surrounding the fate of the polite hijacker who claimed to carry a bomb onto a Northwest Orient flight have led to a bigger question: Why are we so fascinated with D.B. Cooper? 
It is a question that host Knute Berger touched on in an episode of his Mossback’s Northwest video series late last year, but there is much more to discuss. 
For this inaugural episode of the Mossback podcast, Berger and co-host Sara Bernard go deeper into the cult of personality that arose in D.B. Cooper’s wake. They discuss the rise of midair hijackings, the cultural climate that likely made the heist so irresistible to a broad swath of  Americans and what the tale of D.B. Cooper can tell us about our own fractured culture.
Before listening, we suggest you watch the original Mossback's Northwest episode about D.B. Cooper here. 
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Credits
Hosts: Sara Bernard, Knute Berger
Editorial assistance: Mason Bryan
Executive producer: Mark Baumgarten

Introducing the Mossback podcast!

Mossback is the companion podcast to the popular Mossback’s Northwest video series that airs on KCTS 9. The Mossback podcast digs deeper into the topics that fans want to know more about from the current season of Mossback’s Northwest.
Hosted by Sara Bernard, each episode of this series will feature an interview with Mossback, Knute Berger, about one episode of the video series. The podcasts will provide stories and factoids that were left on the cutting room floor, along with critical analysis from Berger and a greater context that will stitch each topic into the long, storied history of the Pacific Northwest.
In this preview teaser, Bernard and Berger chat about the origins and aims of their new venture. 
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Credits
Hosts: Sara Bernard, Knute Berger
Editorial assistance: Mason Bryan
Executive Producer: Mark Baumgarten