( I wrote this two years ago and didn't publish it for some reason. But rereading it I like it and so here it is )

In Olympia we visited the grand old capitol, built in 1928. The dome is the 4th tallest in the world built solely out of masonry! The three bigger domes are all European cathedrals. The US capitol dome, which is larger, has steel supports. I'm not sure why they chose to build it using such ancient methods.

In 1928 this building must have allowed the state legislators to feel very important. Only one year later the economy crashed and then perhaps they might have felt like they overspent on their grand classical monument to ancient values.

The cast bronze doors feature facades of frontier life.

The chandeliers and decorative lighting is by Tiffany.

I've heard some talk about how the US is no longer building grand monuments to itself, such as the Saint Louis arch or the Washington Monument. Nothing as extravagant as the Washington Capitol could be built today by a public institution. There is something oddly aristocratic about this building, built to house a democratically elected legislature. And they would have looked very much like a modern day Roman senate, the rotunda full of middle aged men, wearing not white togas but black business suits of an English cut.

In the lobby is a statue of Marcus Whitman. He was a mountain man missionary and one of the first to come to the northwest on the Oregon trail, in 1836. He settled near Walla Walla and began his attempts to convert the Cayuse native americans to Christianity. In 1847 a measles epidemic killed every single Cayuse child, and half the adults. The tribe saw that the white people were much less affected by the disease, and blamed them. On November 29th the Cayuse killed Whitman and 14 others in their homes, destroyed their houses, and took 53 women and children hostage.

This entryway statue, the first sight of legislators arriving in the morning, would perhaps fill them with a sense of righteous purpose, forging a white mans land in this primitive but fertile backwater.