Railways, Roads, Schools & Churches
Legacy for Us Today: Every River is an Elwha
Think of these History Lesson Series like the human body: Transportation (heart, arteries, veins) distributes sugars, fats, and proteins to bring plants, animals, or governments alive. The first Rocky Mountain transports? Immigrants probably walked here; Cascadia’s most likely paddled a canoe. 14,000 years later escaped Spanish horses began to appear with riders and their sleds. (Wheels and wagons were not used in the Americas, the Incas had 25,000 miles of roads with steps.) 250 years later the North Pacific Rim saw large sailing ships with cannons (the Iphigenia, sailed by Scot under a Portuguese flag in 1789 at Nootka Bay was seized by the Spanish Princess Real that had 26 of these). 30 years later Lewis & Clark felled cottonwoods for easily made canoes, no match for Native war canoes of hand carved, steam formed, Western Redcedar. And more unmatched, a few years later the British sailed 5 of their warships into the San Juans with bigger and more cannon to open a war over a pig. Alas, the Haida attempted to place a cannon in a war canoe’s bow to no avail. 100 years ago, the Mosquito Fleet swarmed Puget Sound shorelines denuding them of trees with diameters large enough to fuel their new iron engines. Horses and wagons (and buggies) dominated. The Iron Horses (a Native nickname) with iron wheels and rails appeared in 1869 when the Union Pacific was completed, the 1st transcontinental railroad followed by the Canadian Pacific (1885), Great Northern (1893), Northern Pacific (1883), Southern Pacific (1883), etc. … all business ventures rewarded by alternating square miles of land along their routes, most used today for logging or growing Douglas Fir clones … built by Swedes, Irish, and Chinese. It was followed by the 2nd “iron engine” to change the West, the loggers’ donkey. Each locomotive pulled commerce daily east and immigrants west, the latter flooding Indian Lands with 1,000x more, new populace than Native Americans could birth. Commerce centers that became towns required schools and churches and people hoping/praying for a better future. Dirt roads welcomed new automobile drivers in the early 1900s (when 1/3rd was steam, 1/3rd electric, and 1/3rd gasoline driven). Towns on the water that hosted sailing ships soon collected their ballast bricks, traded for goods and lumber for brick roads. A few schools became colleges and then universities and health care facilities grew into hospitals with good meaning people like the Sisters of Providence giving their labor and lives to their creation. The need for city property taxes spread across a county of poor immigrants was created. A joint Gardens’ project with Western Washington University’s (SAM) found the best predictor of a plant species’ extinction was the inverse of the distance from an asphalt road; a substance that began to appear in 1894, ~130 years ago … also called tarmac or macadam. Small town locations built around the water gave way to those along the railroads (not always used for transportation, see: H&H Railway, then both were dominated by the ease of access of roads and the ubiquitous Model-T and the asphalt to allow speed of transit, each placed about a day’s horse ride apart. Speed bumps were introduced in 1906, before then the Romans on the stone Apian Way used cut slots to impede thinner wagon wheels. Roads, schools, churches, and railroads tell the West’s History with the Native Americans (left alive, after their Fox Island vacations) tucked away from the turmoil on their reservations with few rivers (like the Elwha) and no seaports, airports, railroads or asphalt roads. Europe’s history is over 1,000s of years, ours is a couple 100s. For related topics, see: Chinese Exclusion Act, Ku Klux Klan, and Nootka Island Today, Abandoned Dreams, Freeborn Village, Milltown, No Rebar, Town of Pilchuck.
When 10 highlighted lesson sections have been reviewed and answered, select the State or Province below for a Completion of Record.
Alberta British Columbia
Alaska California Colorado Idaho Montana
New Mexico Oregon Utah Washington Wyoming
Railways, Roads, Schools & Churches
Copyright © 2024
Ethnobotanicals and native animals also mentioned: Hazelnuts, Elderberries and Gooseberries; Cats: Cougars, Bobcats and today’s Feral cats; Maples: Big Leaf, Vine and Douglas; also Ships: Mosquito Fleet, HMS Satellite and Haida War Canoe.