Forging a Life in the Pilchuck Valley
A look at the rapid expansion of settler life and the struggle to build roads into the rugged Washington backcountry.
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.
During the last year there has been more activity noted between this place and the Pilchuck, in that they are settling upon the timber and mineral lands. Mr. G. A. Brawn, who purchased the site of the C. S. Giddings homestead, has seen quite a few new settlers move into town. Mr. Brawn was the only man to go there one year ago. There was not a nail on his place when the wagon road terminated at the Ditchfields. Within the past year, a trail has been cut out from there for five miles further. It can be a wagon road and was surveyed by the proper authorities last August; and two miles of this newly located road is now a wagon road, so that Mr. Andrews, one of the settlers, drove over his land with a wagon to build him a house recently. The settlers who have located there within that time are: Wm. Funk, Bart Andrews, Chas. Meyers, Williams, John Sexton, the McSorley brothers, and Andrew O'Connor. The McSorley brothers expect a number of friends and relatives to come in soon from California to settle with them there. Mr. O'Connor has put in most of the last summer in helping several of the above-named persons make their first improvements, always a weary task, yet which shows what a man can do in the first moving on to and settling raw, wild land. Nearly all of the rest of his time has been occupied in cutting out this new road, for which he receives no compensation whatever. This trail terminates at the starting point of the Stilhomish road, as surveyed by Mr. Brawn recently, at what is known as the log barn, and on which Mr. O'Connor has sown about a bushel of alfalfa seed this past summer. All that is needed to make thousands of acres of pasture is for this seed to get a start, so the tame grass can spread over the hills.
“Nearly all of the rest of his time has been occupied in cutting out this new road, for which he receives no compensation whatever.”
This 1878 account of early settlers carving out the Pilchuck Valley mirrors the ongoing struggle for infrastructure in Snohomish County. While the 'wagon road' of the 19th century has been replaced by modern highways, the tension between remote settlement and civic infrastructure remains a familiar echo in the Pacific Northwest’s rapidly growing outer rings.
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