Estimable Blogs #3: Outposts: Timothy Egan's NY Times Blog

Outposts is the intermittently updated blog of reporter/columnist/historian Timothy Egan. "Timothy Egan worked for 18 years as a writer for The New York Times," according to his introduction, "first as the Pacific Northwest correspondent, then as a national enterprise reporter. In 2006, Mr. Egan won the National Book Award for his history of people who lived through the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time. In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of reporters who wrote the series How Race Is Lived in America. Mr. Egan is the author of five books, including 'The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest,' and 'Lasso the Wind, Away to the New West.' He lives in Seattle."

Spokanites will be quick to add Breaking Blue, Egan's masterful telling of a 1935 murder case where corrupt Spokane cops murdered a Pend Oreille County town marshal.

Outposts is a collection of Egan's often historically-themed dispatches from various locations in the American West. His latest entry is a masterful and evocative description of the Irish in Butte, Montana:

Butte was a hard-edged, dirty, dangerous town on the crest of the Continental Divide, and if a single man lived to his 30th birthday he was considered lucky. Yet entire parishes left the emerald desperation of County Cork for the copper mines of Butte, fleeing a land where British occupiers had once refused to let mothers educate their children, and where famine had killed a million people in seven years’ time.

I want to be Timothy Egan when I grow up.