Thomas Teakle was born April 14, 1878, in Scotland, Keokuk County, Iowa. He was educated in rural schools in Iowa, after which he entered Iowa State Teachers Normal School, which later became Iowa State College. He took his degree there in 1904, and later earned his B.A. degree in 1911 from the University of Iowa. He briefly held the principalship at Pocatello, Idaho before returning to Iowa where he taught until 1919. That year he joined the History department at Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane, a position he held until his retirement in 1946. Thomas was deeply interested in Northwest history/ He embarked on a project which consumed his remaining years. In the first summer upon his retirement, he set out to visit the historical libraries of the Northwest and read all the early day newspaper which he would later make into transcripts. The end result was a set of 79 volumes, including a general index. Thomas also became very involved in a group called the Westerners, a group of individuals intent on preserving the history of the development of the Western United States. The Spokane branch of that organization wrote and published a quarterly journal, The Pacific Northwesterner, which was still in publication as of 2011. Mr. Teakle died in 1969.