The Brutal Labor of Clearing the Snohomish River
For over two years, crews braved the most dangerous and grueling work in the territory to clear the river for navigation, battling everything from treacherous snags to a lack of promised payment.
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.
In the fall of 1876, General Michler, of the U.S. Army, arrived with authority to spend $5,000 in clearing the channel through the Snohomish River. Work on the river, or upper jam, commenced in May 1877. In clearing the lower river, six or eight men had been employed for a short time to interfere as little as possible with navigation. This was nearly all the help ever employed. Work on the upper jam has continued since May 1877. There is now a channel about 100 feet wide, and about two miles long, through the upper jam. These loggers will probably work another year in widening this channel, and in clearing those old logs from the river. When completed, the channel will in no place be less than 200 feet wide, mostly 300 feet, and in some places it will be cleared from bank to bank 400 feet wide. These men have been given nearly two and a half years of their time, and require yet another year's labor to complete their work. Their labor has been the hardest and most dangerous imaginable. This work has opened up to steamboats a valley as fertile, and nearly as large, as the famous Connecticut River Valley in New England, and containing a population of over 100,000. They are exceptionally earnest and sincere. Individuals have contributed about $5,000 in cash and their own subscriptions, $1,500 more is promised them but not paid. In a single week, by the breaking up of parts of the jam, they have lost as much as $150 worth of tools. Large parts of the implements used they were compelled to buy themselves, and they have lost and tied up of their own private means over $700. They are now compelled to labor as other day laborers, simply to keep their families. They will do a lot of work that will fail to find payment from the authorities.
“Their labor has been the hardest and most dangerous imaginable.”
The massive, multi-year, and underfunded effort to clear the Snohomish River for navigation mirrors the ongoing, expensive, and often politically fraught struggle to manage the river’s flood-prone banks today. Like the loggers of 1877, modern local civic projects often find themselves caught between ambitious development goals and the harsh reality of budget shortfalls and private financial risk.
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