A Canal to Nowhere? Engineers Dismiss the Hood Canal Cut

Chief Engineer Casey, Division Engineer Cox and Capt. Thomas W. Symons, U.S.A., are strongly opposed to the project to make the Hood Canal country tributary to Tacoma by cutting a channel from the canal to North Bay. In his report on the proposed work, Assistant Engineer Ricksecker says:

Hood Canal—named by Vancouver in his explorations of 1792—is a natural channel or arm of Puget Sound. It extends southeasterly for eighty-three miles, then bends sharply east and continues northeasterly fourteen miles farther. Its depth ranges from 140 to over 600 feet, while its shores are lined with abrupt hills rising from 50 to 3,000 feet above the water. Very little land along the canal is suitable for cultivation—perhaps one acre in 100. It is covered at present with fir, cedar and spruce timber, the best of which near the water's edge has been logged off. Numerous small streams empty into the canal, and along these there is, with exceptions, a very limited amount of land that can be cultivated.

From estimates given by people living along the canal, Quilcene has about 4,500 acres susceptible to cultivation; the Skokomish River, 1,000; Union River, 800; Tahuyeh River, 500; and elsewhere 400. The principal towns are Quilcene, with about 400 people, a hotel, barber shop, two blacksmith shops, two general stores, three carpenter shops and a sawmill with daily capacity of about 4,000 feet; Port Gamble, six miles inside the mouth of the canal, with about 350 people, a large sawmill and a general merchandise store, owned by the Puget Mill Company; Union City, forty-six miles from Port Gamble, with 300 people, two hotels, a sawmill, a drugstore, a grocery, a general merchandise store doing $8,000 to $10,000 annually, a church and a $3,000 schoolhouse; Hoodsport, with about fifty people, two hotels, a store, blacksmith shop, telegraph office and schoolhouse; Lilliwaup, a summer resort with a hotel and post office and about twenty people; and Seabeck, a deserted town of some forty houses, formerly the site of a large sawmill that burned in 1885.

Logging is the chief industry, although little has been done in the past year and a half. The Puget Lumber Company's shipments for September 1894 included 1,537,000 feet of lumber and 11,175 linear feet of cedar poles to Honolulu, and 2,636,000 feet of lumber, 46,200 pieces of laths and 27,910 linear feet of piling to California.

Examination of the ridge between Hood Canal and North Bay shows the isthmus at its narrowest is two miles wide. Its general elevation is 500 feet; its maximum elevation is 3,285 feet and the lowest pass is 210 feet. Two projects were considered: a high-level canal and a sea-level canal. The first is impracticable for lack of water supply. The second, the only feasible one, would require an average cut of 290 feet for two miles at the narrowest point, a mass removal of 51,500,000 cubic feet of earthwork, and dredging across 6,000 feet of tide flats to obtain twenty-six feet of water at low tide.

There is at this time no commerce to warrant the building of such a canal and no prospect of an early change in the existing conditions. Taking the broadest possible view, since there is little agricultural land to support a large population, the only commerce that might be benefited is the logging interest, where the towing distance to one of the largest mills on the Sound would be reduced by fifty-four miles, and an uncertain quantity of ore that may be mined at some future time. The general opinion of the people living along the canal is that there is no demand for the improvement other than the circulation of money in that region.