Record Details

Cowlitz corridor

ScholarsArchive at Oregon State University

Field Value
Title Cowlitz corridor
Names McClelland, John M. (John Morris), 1915- (creator)
Kletsch, Albert Gustav (creator)
Date Issued 1953 (iso8601)
Note Gerald W. Williams Collection
Abstract "... The Cowlitz Valley connects the prairies south of the Sound
with the Columbia Valley and Oregon. It is a natural corridor,
used continuously and with ever increasing frequency for more
than a century.
The story of the Cowlitz Corridor is primarily one of modes of
travel. It begins with foot trails and shovel-nosed Indian canoes
and ends with U. S. 99 converted to four lanes and astra-domed
streamliners traveling over the same roadbed where once puffed the first standard gauge locomotive in Washington, the sturdy
hut small Minnetonka.
In between were long years when even a governor's wife, in
order to traverse the valley, was forced to sit all day cramped in
a narrow canoe, when the one road was so muddy and steep the
stagecoach horses had to be changed at the end of a nine-mile
run, and when the only way a farmer could get his oats out to
the Portland market was on a shallow draft steamboat that could
make regular runs when the water was just right.
But always there was movement of some kind explorers taking
a first look at new country; families moving in to settle; the
first produce going out to market; sheep being herded north; cattle
for export being floated south; farm machinery going up;
potatoes and hops coming down; gold seekers rushing south to
California in '49 and north to Alaska in '98; first citizens canoeing
down to Monticello to petition for a territory in 1852 and
going north to Olympia to establish a government in '53; new
army draftees being hurried up to the Seattle Port of Embarkation
in 1942; rotation troops going home from Korea in 1952. Through the years the movement has been steady, sometimes
exciting, always interesting. This is the story of the corridor."--Preface
Genre Book
Topic Cowlitz County (Wash.) -- History
Identifier http://hdl.handle.net/1957/9786

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