Naches pass
| Naches pass | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Pass height | 1502 m | ||
| Washington | Pierce County / King County / Kittitas County / Yakima County | ||
| Mountains | Cascade chain | ||
| Map (Washington) | |||
|
|||
| Coordinates | 47 ° 5 '13 " N , 121 ° 22' 46" W | ||
The Naches Pass (1,502 m high ) is a mountain pass of the Cascade Range in the US state of Washington . It is located about 80 km east of Tacoma and about 80 km northwest of Yakima near the sources of tributaries of the Naches River in the east and the Greenwater River in the west. The boundaries of Pierce , King , Kittitas and Yakima Counties meet at this pass. The pass lies on the border between Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest and Wenatchee National Forest , approximately 10 miles northeast of Mount Rainier National Park . In 1853 a road was built over the pass for the pioneers' covered wagons.
history
The old Indian route, known as the Naches Trail , led over the Naches Pass and through the cascade chain to create a connection between the different Salish peoples on the west side ( Nisqually and Puyallup ) with the Yakima on the east side of the mountains. In general, the trail was used for trading fish and horses.
Although already used by Catholic missionaries from the Hudson's Bay Company , the Naches Trail was officially explored in the summer of 1841 when Lieutenant Charles Wilkes of the United States Exploring Expedition instructed Lieutenant Robert E. Johnson to continue exploring east across the Cascade Range, including the Naches To use passport. The expedition followed the existing Indian Trail around the northern flank of Mount Rainier and over the pass. They reached Fort Colvile and Fort Okanogan east of the mountains.
The new settlements at Puget Sound were slow to develop, partly due to poor access. Michael T. Simmons, one of the region's first pioneers, led efforts to build a road over Naches Pass in 1850, but the dense forests and steep mountains made it difficult and the attempt failed. Emigrants arriving in Portland in the Oregon Territory and heading north had to fight their way up the muddy Cowlitz Trail , first using the rivers and then the land route to get to the south end of Puget Sound . One of the first tasks the Washington Territory took on when it was split off from the Oregon Territory was building a road for the covered wagons across the Cascade Range, aimed at directing emigrants to Puget Sound rather than Willamette Valley .
Not wanting to wait for the sluggish federal government and to attract emigrants as early as 1853, the residents of the Puget Sound region raised funds to send Edward Jay Allen, John Edgar, George Shazer and Whitfield Kirtley to cross the Naches Pass explore and determine their suitability as a covered wagon road. The group started on June 1, 1853 and reached the open prairies of eastern Washington sixteen days later. They concluded that a road could be built. Allen hurried back to Olympia with the news and left a personal, detailed account of his explorations for posterity.
Meanwhile, in April 1853 , Captain George B. McClellan received special orders from both Governor Isaac Stevens and Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to find suitable cascade passes for military roads, to have the roads ready in time for the fall to be used by the expected emigrants and also to explore which of the passes could be suitable for a railway line in the future. He left Columbia Barracks (now Vancouver, Washington) and slowly worked his way up the Cascades.
When it became clear that McClellan would be able to finish the road by fall (or ever), the Puget Sound residents took it upon themselves to build the road. The money raised was used to support two teams of road builders. A team led by Edward Jay Allen worked east of the Puyallup Valley towards Naches Pass and a few miles beyond. The second team, led by Whitfield Kirtley, worked westward to complete the road between Yakima and the pass. Unfortunately, this team "disassembled" itself and returned to Olympia within a month and had done little more than marking the route with clearings.
On August 25, 1853, McClellan finally reached the Naches Pass, found it unsuitable for the railroad, and continued north. On September 12th, Andrew Moore, a member of Olympia's Roads Committee, located the captain near what is now Ellensburg and had him agree to sign Allen's men. From that day on, they would be paid to build the road they had previously built as a volunteer. Seemingly satisfied to have complied with his orders to build roads over the mountains, McClellan continued his journey north, awaiting a meeting with Governor Stevens, who was on his way west from Minnesota.
Another pioneer of the era, James Longmire's covered wagon train, reached Fort Walla Walla in early September 1853 and was about to move on to Puget Sound. Convinced of using the new "People's Road" over the Naches Pass, they followed the route up the Naches and Little Naches Rivers into the mountains, leaving the prairies of eastern Washington behind and entering the north-western forests for the first time in mid-September. Here they followed Kirtley's clearings, which marked a trail but not a road. The wagon train cut a road into the landscape as it advanced. After five miles (8 km) east of the pass, they found Allen's more suitable road and reached Naches Pass in early October.
After overcoming difficulties such as food restrictions, abseiling the wagons over steep slopes, and crossing the White River multiple times, the wagon train drove down the western slopes of the Cascade Range. The emigrants came from the forest to the open prairie where today's Enumclaw is, and reached Fort Steilacoom in mid-October.
Mitchell's covered wagon train crossed the pass just three weeks later, followed by others in 1854, but the Naches Pass Wagon Road never became popular. In addition to the difficult descent from Naches Pass (which was simplified in 1854), 68 crossings of the Naches and Little Naches Rivers east of the pass and multiple crossings of the White River on the west side were required.
Lieutenant Richard Arnold, based in Ft. Steilacoom, was officially commissioned in 1854 to oversee the completion of the road. He scouted the trail with Allen in May and then signed him and his team in the summer to improve and smooth the road (or, in Allen's words, "sand it"). Among the emigrants who used the road in the fall of 1854 were the covered wagon trains run by Winfield Scott Ebey and Jacob Redding Meeker.
The outbreak of the Puget Sound War and the Yakima War in 1855 occupied the settlers elsewhere and left the use of the Carriage Road to the Indians and the Army. In addition, as early as 1855, Lieutenant Abiel Tinkham had determined that the Snoqualmie Pass was better suited as a route to cross the mountains. After the Indian Wars, the Naches Pass route was used almost exclusively by cowboys, who until the turn of the century regularly drove their herds over the pass in both directions.
In the 1920s, Ezra Meeker campaigned powerfully for the state government to select the Naches Pass route for a southern highway crossing the state. The road builders' hidden funds and their plans to build a hotel on the north side of Mount Rainier National Park led to the construction of the Chinook Pass Highway instead . A proposed road over Naches Pass was added to the state highways system in 1943 and is still on state planning as Washington State Route 168 , but the road was never built. Nowadays the old covered wagon road is a popular and nationally known slope for off-road vehicles.
See also
- Mike Hiler: A history of Naches Pass . In: Signpost for Northwest Trails . Oregon-California Trails Association (nachestrail.org). Pp. 34-37. July 1989. Retrieved March 29, 2018.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Mount Rainier: Its Human History Associations , National Park Service
- ↑ a b c d e f g Karen L. Johnson, Dennis M. Larsen: A Yankee on Puget Sound: Pioneer Dispatches of Edward Jay Allen, 1852-1855 , First. Edition, Washington State University Press, Pullman, WA. 2013, ISBN 978-0-87422-315-6 .
- ^ A b c Paul Dorpat, Genevieve McCoy: Building Washington: A History of Washington State Public Works . Tartu Publications, 1998, ISBN 0-9614357-9-8 .