Here at the forks of the rushing Methow, Boston-bred Guy Waring founded Winthrop in 1891. Trappers, prospectors and homesteaders tramped into his frontier store. In '95 Colonel Thomas Hart came through to carve a narrow-gauge wagon road across the Cascades, linking this valley with the Slate Creek Mining District. Meanwhile Waring, who hated liquor, opened his Duck Brand Saloon to keep worse ones out. Anyone who started getting drunk was given the boot — A policy which must have greatly surprised many patrons. Waring's Harvard classmate, Owen Wister, spent his honeymoon here in 1898. Four years later Wister completed "The Virginian" and the first western novel burst upon the unsuspecting nation. Winthrop's first postmaster named the town after Theodore Winthrop, a young Yale graduate who toured the northwest in 1853.
To see Guy Waring's original 1897 home and Shafer Museum's historical village go one block up the hill and two blocks to the right.
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