Behind the Sign

Sail north of the Sitkaday Narrows, below the Brady Icefield in Glacier Bay National Park, and you’ll travel past a body of water known as Whidbey Passage. If that name sounds familiar, it certainly should. Like the island on the other side of Deception Pass from Skagit County, it was named for Master Joseph Whidbey, the first European voyager to determine that Whidbey Island is, in fact, just that — an island.

Situated beside the Skagit River in one of the most fertile valleys of the Pacific Northwest, it's no surprise that Mount Vernon developed from a small river settlement into the commercial and governmental center of the Magic Skagit. Its history, going back to "time immemorial," encompasses Indigenous peoples, pioneer settlement, logging and agriculture, steamboats and railroads, destructive fires and floods, highway construction, and the continuing effort to preserve both farmland and a historic downtown identity. Through all of these changes, the Skagit River (the largest river flowing into Puget Sound) has remained Mount Vernon’s most defining feature.

My wife and I were recently traveling north on Hwy. 97 through Oregon, on the way home from a family reunion in California’s gold country. We were passing through the town of Chemult (population 79), just northeast of Crater Lake, when a mural on the long side of a restaurant immediately caught our eyes. And once again we found ourselves asking the question that had arisen in so many travels in the PNW and beyond: Who the heck is henry?