Shifting Civic Fortunes
The Sunday Oregonian
November 19, 1922

The ups and down in the destinies of towns and cities suggested by present contention over the location of the county seat of Cowlitz county in our neighboring state of Washington are among the commonest of civic phenomena in the rapidly growing west. They have been peculiarly characteristic of the Oregon country since the very inception, of the town building era, which closely coincides with the resolution of the northwest boundary question in 1846, and they have known no cessation. 

This year, too, marked the beginning of settlement of the portion of Oregon north of the Columbia river. But the route by which men traveled in the preceding fur trading period lay through a region now rich in historic memories. The name Kalama, for example, is probably associated with the Indian lore of a period before the Chinook jargon was born and the Cowlitz farms of the Hudson's Bay company represented an early and significant venture in agriculture in the Pacific Northwest. 

Prior to the coming of the first permanent settlers, the region was an important station on the way from the Columbia river to Puget Sound. It was here, too, that the foundation was laid for the present separate commonwealth of Washington. Just half a century ago The Oregonian related in its news columns that the steamer Fannie Troup had "carried to Kalama yesterday some very ponderous machinery which will be used in the car shops at that place." "This machinery," declared the veracious chronicler, "is for the purpose of pressing car wheels on the shafts."

The item is a reminder of one of the first great town booms north of the Columbia. Kalama, indeed, enjoyed the benefits of railroad connection with the north some years before Portland was similarly favored. Ground was broken at the present site of the first-named city for the western terminus of the Northern Pacific railroad in May, 1870, only a few weeks after work had been begun at the eastern terminus near Duluth.

In these circumstances, having regard of the universal desire of the people for railroad connection with the eastern states, the reader of history will not wonder at what may now seem to be the extravagant hopes of the city builders of that time. Some two years before Portland had obtained connection with St. Joseph, on the Yamhill river, its first railroad connection, the Northern Pacific had pushed north from Kalama a distance of twenty miles, along the trail over which Michael T. Simmons and John R. Jackson had traveled nearly a quarter of a century before. 

The region north of the Columbia then seemed favored of fortune above all others. "The whistle of the locomotive was now heard," says a diarist of the period, "in a locality which but twenty-five years earlier had never known the pressure of a wheel." The contagious optimism of Jay Cooke had penetrated to the farthest west. When the literature of the promoters took notice of the "banana belt" through which the railroad was scheduled to pass all western Washington recognized in the allusion a tribute to the suavity of its climate and the productivity of its soil. 

The historian says; The owner of a claim on the Columbia where the railroad managers wished to locate the river terminus and begin building their line northward, had been offered $10,000 and ten lots in the new town for his claim, but he refused it; he wanted $50,000. The river terminus was then located at another point four miles away. As soon as road building was begun speculation in town lots, both at the river terminus and at prospective stations along the line, became active.

Prices advanced with every sale and the most surprising expectations were entertained. Kalama was soon to outstrip Portland, it was said; it was sure to be the chief city of the Columbia; it might even excel New York and Chicago and be the chief city of the coast and perhaps of the country. All this stimulated the expectations of other settlers, particularly in the hopeful towns on the sound.

Cowlitz country had previously, in the early 1860s, been inoculated with the railroad building virus, which led to an effort to build a railroad by private initiative, a task, clearly in advance of the time in which it was undertaken. But the last spike of the line between Kalama and Tacoma was driven on December 16, 1873, the road narrowly escaping the devastating consequences of the panic of 1873, and for ten years before connection was established between Portland and the east, Kalama was an important, busy and always hopeful community, characterized by high civic spirit and confident that destiny had marked it for distinction. 

Town building proceeded far in advance of the fundamental resources of the territory, but was nevertheless marked by a not wholly unhealthy competition, for which sympathetic allowance will be made by those who comprehend the individualistic spirit of the pioneers. It is now recalled that in an only slightly earlier time Milton, St. Helens, Milwaukee, Linnton had looked forward with confidence to becoming  the metropolis of the western coast.

It was a simpler matter to demonstrate to the first town boomers that the country did not need as many cities as had then been laid out than to persuade them to abandon the race. No one realized that better than they. The forces which shaped the individual destinies of cities were natural and spontaneous and in all probability beyond the prophetic token of even the wisest men.