I AM WOMAN, HEAR ME ROAR

Photo restorer DJ Bassett and wife Magdalena, who did the design work, pore over the book. “For us, this was an ideal job,” said Magdalena Bassett.

New book features peninsula’s toughest females

by AVANI NADKARNI
Staff writer

DJ Bassett was used to being surrounded by ladies.

As the lone male in Glynda Peterson-Schaad’s “Wild Women of the West” class, a continuing education course taught through Peninsula College, he said he always has had an interest in women’s history.

“He was the only guy in there, out of 30 students,” said Port Angeles resident Peterson-Schaad, laughing. “It was good to see.”

During one of her classes, Bassett recalled, Peterson-Schaad came in with a pile of material and some papers fell onto the floor.

“One of the items was a (century-old) letter,” said Bassett, who is a photographer and historian who restores old photographs. “I said ‘Why don’t you let me take this and restore it?’”

Peterson-Schaad hesitantly agreed, and Bassett took it home to fix it up.

“When I gave it back to her she said ‘How much do I owe you?’” Bassett laughed. “I said ‘Nothing, but if you do anything down the line, keep me in mind.’”

As it turned out, Peterson-Schaad did have something down the line — a book featuring 12 of the toughest 19th century pioneering women of the Olympic Peninsula, a project she was working on with her brother Gary Peterson.

The siblings previously co-authored “High Divide: Minnie Peterson’s Olympic Mountain Adventures,” chronicling their grandmother’s journey.

“One of the things we thought was really lacking on the peninsula were books having to do with women and the role that they played in history,” Peterson-Schaad explained. “We saw a hole there.”

Peterson-Schaad and Peterson gathered information, pictures and stories about the dozen women, which included Ella Guptill, who according to the authors was elected to a government post in a time when women were not even allowed to vote, and Carrie Rixon, for whom the nearly 7,000-foot Mount Carrie is named.

“Anyone who has a mountain named after them has to be a woman to reckon with,” Peterson-Schaad said, laughing.
Remembering Bassett, she asked him to restore the hundreds of pictures that were being considered to be in the book and then asked his designer wife, Magdalena, to help with the layout of the book.

So, once again, DJ Bassett found himself surrounded by women, or rather, pictures of pioneering peninsula women. 
The Bassetts steadily worked on the project, often consulting with Peterson-Schaad and Peterson, and soon found themselves completely immersed in it.

“When I do these projects I usually don’t read the text fully because it would take forever,” Magdalena said. “(With this book) I kept catching myself reading the text. These women became real to me ? from these two-dimensional flat cardboard characters, they came to life.”

Bassett spent countless hours reworking the old photographs, scanning them into his computer and eliminating scratches and marks that had accumulated over the decades.

“When Gary and Glynda gave us the pictures, they had no idea what could be made of them,” Magdalena said. “They were small, some were bleached out, they were crinkled.”

DJ said that while he worked to make the pictures look better, he did not change anything that might alter the history.
“I don’t change anything that would change the information in the photo,” he said. “I left warts, birthmarks, things like that, because they help tell the story.”

One picture in particular, of Sequim's Martha Irwin Merchant Maybury, took nearly 40 hours to complete, he said.
“Her face was almost invisible,” he said. “It took a lot of restoring.”

The work was worth it — Maybury’s picture, and story, turned out to be one of Peterson-Schaad’s favorites.

“She was amazing,” Peterson-Schaad said. “In the face of all kinds of challenges and prejudices and discrimination and hostility, she was a giver. She didn’t seem to be one to sit around and complain and whine and cry ‘Woe is me.’”

To Peterson-Schaad and the Bassetts, one of the best things about completing the book was the opportunity to meet descendants of many of the women.

“We’ve had the pleasure of meeting many of them,” said Peterson-Schaad, who added that several of Maybury’s descendants met for the first time in 50 years at her home.

Peterson-Schaad, who plans to co-author a sequel with the “next generation” of women with her brother, said the lives the dozen women led made it easy to persevere with the book.

“(The women) were bold, brave, intrepid women, who were at times brazen, defiant, audacious and even impudent,” she said. “None of them had it easy ? none of them lived charmed lives.  They didn’t go with the flow all the time, sometimes they swam upstream.”

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“Women to Reckon With: Untamed Women of the Olympic Wilderness” is part of what co-author siblings Glynda Peterson-Schaad and Gary Peterson hope will be a series of books featuring strong peninsula women. The preordered books available in bookstores in Sequim and Port Angeles sold out quickly, and a new shipment is expected within the next few weeks.

Pacific Mist Books is accepting orders. To preorder a copy, call 683-1396 or visit 121 W. Washington St. For more information, contact co-author Glynda Peterson at glynda@olypen.com.