Hop King

Ezra Meeker is best known as one of the Pacific Northwest’s most colorful pioneers, an emigrant who first ventured west to future Washington Territory in 1852 via the Oregon Trail, a journey he repeated several times during his ninty-eight years in order to call public attention to the historic route. This is not the portion of Meeker’s long life that Dennis Larsen presents in Hop King: Ezra Meeker’s Boom Years. However, Hop King is in its own way an enlightening adventure story because it details the ups and downs of Meeker’s fortunes as an agriculturalist based in a remote corner of the world, who by the 1870s found himself already enmeshed in what commentators today call the “global economy.” Meeker’s life as an international entrepreneur striving to profit from the global commerce in hops mirrors the story of the Pacific Northwest’s economy in general, which despite the region’s seeming remoteness was from pioneer days already part of a global system of trade and markets. Meeker, the Oregon Trail pioneer, made several lengthy trips to England and Continental Europe in response to the intense competition in raising and marketing the highly finicky hops used to give beer its bitter flavor. Meeker emerged as the “hop king” because eventually he raised more hops than any one else in the United States, but the king was dramatically toppled from his throne by the market collapse during the severe depression of the mid-1890s. Not only did his hop empire rapidly collapse, but so too did Meeker’s several ancillary businesses. Without looking back at the ruins, Meeker quickly redirected his energy into a new form of entrepreneurship: mining.

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