The Lake Rose a Foot an Hour and the Hotel Bathhouse Floated Away
A Christmas-week gale swells Lake Cushman, floods the valley bottom, snaps the ice and — at least — opens the way for snowbound settlers on the South Fork of the Skokomish.
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.
LAKE CUSHMAN, Dec. 27. — [Special.] — The storm of Wednesday raised the lake very rapidly, and by Thursday the lower bottom of the valley near the lake was all afloat. The water rose Wednesday night at the rate of one foot per hour, and by daylight Thursday was two and a half feet deep on the floor of the Cushman house. The wind blew a gale during the greater part of Wednesday night, and many trees in this neighborhood were overturned. The bathhouse belonging to the hotel was broken loose from its moorings and landed in the brush on the opposite side of the lake. The wind broke up the ice with which the lake has been covered for the past week, and navigation is now possible.
While the rain took off a good deal of the snow, it still lies on the bottom lands to the depth of about four inches. The settlers on the South Fork of the Skokomish, many of whom have not yet got in their winter supplies and who were shut out by the snow, will now, in all probability, be able to procure their supplies. Like Lake Cushman, the South Fork lies in an unsurveyed township, but there is much fine land, and a thriving little colony has settled there during the past three years and much work done. A good bridge, built by the settlers and the merchants of Hoodsport, crosses the North Fork of the Skokomish at the head of the Great Canyon, and from there the balance of the distance is by trail. The county has promised to put a wagon road in to the settlement next season. Last summer a road was cut from Hoodsport to the reservation, and there now remains about two miles across that to the river, which is to be bridged at the Webb ranch, and then we will have through connection with Shelton and the balance of the county east and south of the Canal. Three years ago there was not a mile of wagon road in the county west of Hood's Canal.
“The water rose Wednesday night at the rate of one foot per hour.”
Lake Cushman still rises fast when an Olympic Peninsula storm sits overhead, and the same question from 1893 — who builds the road, who bridges the river, who gets through to Shelton — is still settled at the county level. The detail that the flood was, perversely, a relief to snowbound settlers shows how thin the margin was for homesteaders cut off from winter supplies.
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