Authored by local historian Jack R. Evans, Levant F. Thompson: Hop King, Banker, Senator, Pierce County, Washington Pioneer chronicles the extraordinary life and rapid rise of a defining 19th-century Pacific Northwest entrepreneur. The book traces Thompson’s multifaceted career from an ambitious agrarian settler into a dominant agricultural baron controlling vast hop-growing empires, before pivoting into banking and state politics. Through extensive archival records and biographical details, the text illuminates the volatile economic forces and speculative fortunes that built the infrastructure of early Pierce County. A keen insight drawn from the work is how regional agricultural monopolies served as the foundational launchpad for political power; by converting massive windfalls from the speculative hop boom into banking capital and legislative influence, pioneers like Thompson demonstrated that early Washington state politics were directly engineered by those who could successfully weather the boom-and-bust cycles of single-crop commodity markets.