“Survival in a Mill Town” examines the early union struggles and difficult lives of early settlers who followed the first trains to the Pacific Northwest for work in lumber mills. It was an era at the turn of the 20th Century that helped shape the Pacific Northwest and made timber barons overnight fortunes with the stripping of rich virgin forests. The new book by Washington state native and former Oregon journalist Von Braschler chronicles the events that led to one bloody Sunday in 1916 known as the Everett Massacre. It is a work of historical fiction that centers on his hometown of Everett. …George Weyerhaeuser built several of his first mills in Everett with the million acres of trees he acquired from empire builder James Hill, his St. Paul neighbor who connected the forest of the Pacific Northwest with his railroad. Together they built the towns of the Pacific Northwest with smokestacks lined up between hastily leveled tree stumps.