[From: The Pacific Railroad Preservation Association]

The Northern Pacific line from Tacoma to Kalama began service January 5, 1874 and included runs between Portland and Kalama by steamboat on the Willamette and Columbia Rivers.

Kalama was entirely a Northern Pacific railroad creation. It was unofficially born in May 1870 when the Northern Pacific railroad turned the first shovel of dirt. Northern Pacific built a dock, a sawmill, a car shop, a roundhouse, a turntable, hotels, a hospital, stores, homes. In just a few months in 1870, the working population exploded to approximately 3500 and the town had added tents, saloons, a brewery, and a gambling hall. Soon the town had a motto: "Rail Meets Sail".

Clemens aboard the steamer Flyer. Seattle. August 8
Mark Twain Archive, Elmira College courtesy of Kevin Mac Donnell, Austin, Texas.

Flyer was the first vessel ordered by the Columbia River and Puget Sound Navigation Company, a concern formed by Capt. U.B. Scott and others, which already controlled the fast sternwheeler Telephone on the Columbia River, and on Puget Sound, the then new and fast sternwheeler Bailey Gatzert as well as the express passenger boat Fleetwood.

Twain's party transferred to the "Little Greyhound of Puget Sound", the Flyer upon arriving in Seattle. Twain was not impressed with the baggage handlers. They arrived in Tacoma at five o'clock. The ladies remain there while Major Pond and Twain travel to Portland, Oregon.

The Treaty of Point Elliott of 1855, is the lands settlement treaty between the United States government and the nominal Native American tribes of the greater Puget Sound region. in the recently formed Washington Territory (March 1853), one of about thirteen treaties between the U.S. and Native Nations in what is now Washington.The treaty was signed on 22 January 1855, at Point Elliott, now Mukilteo (Muckl-te-oh ), Washington, and ratified 8 March and 11 April 1859.

Stevens Pass is named for John F. Stevens, an engineer in the employ of the Great Northern Railway. He had located the route the railway took over the Rockies, Marias Pass, and he had found the route over his eponymous pass. Not an ideal route but workable and James Jerome Hill had little time to waste.

In 1889, the Great Northern Railroad leased trackage rights through the Tumwater Canyon. In the agreement, the GN was required to maintain it, but the right-of-way remained the property of the CR & TN. Included in the agreement was the stipulation that any changes made would allow the CR & TN to use the Tumwater Canyon, resulting in a rather strange, but not all that uncommon, three rail arrangement. As engineering techniques improved, the GN was able to do away with the switchback and tunnel method employed by the CR & TN, replacing it with track that had a maximum 2.2% grade.

With the opening of the line to the coast, GN received twenty E-7 Ten-Wheelers (4-6-0's). Sporting 72" drivers and a tractive effort of 17,730 lbs, they were the first Ten-Wheelers acquired specifically for passenger service. The E-7s were limited to 9 passenger cars and 350 tons. While reliable Eight-Wheelers (4-4-0's) continued to handle the train for the level parts of the journey, the E-7 serves as the backbone of the transcontinental passenger power pool.

This is a land of abandoned erosional waterways, streamless coulees with empty cataract cliffs and plunge basins, potholes and deep rock basins, all eroded into the basalt of the gently southwestward dipping slope of the Columbia Plateau. The pattern of dry stream ways; a plexus, an anastomosis; totally unlike any other drainage pattern on earth. A debacle was demanded to explain this landscape, the volume of which would fill normal stream valleys to overflowing. These great floods spilled over former divides, eroding their summits to complete the new network.