The Hard Road to Fish Lake and the Tall Tales Found There
A traveler recounts the grueling journey from Cle-Elum to Fish Lake, where prospectors and mountain air await—if you can survive the trip.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A leather medal of enormous proportions is now under construction for the originator of the canard that the road is good between Cle-Elum and this point. When you reach Fish Lake you forget all the jolts and jostles of the bad road, and were it not for the haunting idea of having to tread the same measure on the return trip, you could abandon yourself to the pleasures of the grand scenery, pure mountain air and water. I found Matt Bartholet and Phil Stanton, with their families, located on the site of the future great city, which has already been christened 'Stanton.' Up the valley are located the cabins of Timothy and John Lynch, who are now operating a small arrastra, and set figures of $100,000 on their respective mines, the Aurora and Mountain Sprite. Their prospects, which are fast nearing development, are pronounced by experts to be 'very rich indeed.' We had not recovered from the soreness of this trip, after returning to the city of Stanton, when a gang of fishermen from Ellensburgh drove up and informed us that a wagon load of Yakimites were 'hung up' about five miles below. We gallantly rescued them, and then the subscription for a leather medal for the champion 'blanket-stretcher' was started.
“A leather medal... is now under construction for the originator of the canard that the road is good between Cle-Elum and this point.”
Early boomtown speculation in the Cle-Elum/Fish Lake area often led to grand, over-promised settlements that vanished shortly thereafter, a frequent phenomenon in the Washington territory's frontier era.
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