" ... 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

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