History Highlights

Our great river of the West, the Columbia, has always dominated the history of southeast Washington and the entire Pacific Northwest. It early became a river of destiny, coveted as a prize of empire by Spain, Russia, and Great Britain. Even after Robert Gray explored the lower Columbia in 1792 and claimed it for the U.S., Great Britain also claimed it and all the land it drained. Russia, then a weak nation, withdrew from contention in the mid-1820s. Otherwise, our river might well be known today as the New Volga or the New Lena, and instead of being named Pasco, our city might well have become a New Irkutsh or a New Tomsk. River of destiny, you say?

Members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, arriving at the mouth of the Snake River on their westward journey on Oct. 16, 1805, where they camped for several days while trading with the local Indians for salmon and dogs, were the first white men to set foot in our vicinity. Sacajawea State Park commemorates that campsite.

David Thompson, a Canadian fur trader, and members of Astor’s Pacific Fur Company visited our area in 1811. The powerful Hudson’s Bay Company, British fur traders, dominated the fur trade in the Oregon Country for several decades, using the Columbia and its tributaries as the main arteries of trade connecting their interior posts with their chief trading post at Fort Vancouver. During prolonged negotiations covering a couple of decades, Britain insisted on the Columbia River as the international boundary, but in 1846 she agreed on the 49th parallel instead. Again, destiny was on our side. From the main flow of Oregon Trail emigrants en route to the Willamette Valley, a few began stopping off in southeast Washington in the late 1850s and 1860s. During the latter decade, miners coming up the Columbia River en route to the gold mines in Montana, Idaho, and Cariboo, disembarked from riverboats at Wallula from where they traveled on overland trails to the mines. The Mullan Military Road across Franklin County received heavy use.

The coming of the Northern Pacific Railway brought a great rush of settlers to Washington Territory, leading to statehood in 1889. The temporary construction town of Ainsworth, which sprang up at the mouth of the Snake River in 1879 when the railroad built a bridge across the river, became the predecessor of Pasco. After completion of the Snake River Bridge in 1884, the workers have moved en masse to Pasco to commence construction of the railroad bridge across the Columbia River, and Ainsworth soon faded from the scene. During its brief life span, it had become the temporary county seat of the newly created Franklin County in 1883. The courthouse was moved from Ainsworth to Pasco in 1886. Among the several versions of the origin of the name Pasco, the most widely accepted is that it was named by Virgil G. Bogue, a construction engineer for the Northern Pacific Railway who had previously helped build a railroad in the Andes Mountains near Cerro de Pasco, Peru.

Pasco, not yet incorporated, entered the race for the location of the state capitol in 1889. Captain W.P. Gray, a local steamboat operator, and booster persuaded the citizens to pledge $40,000 in cash and 300 acres of land to locate the capitol here. In the statewide election to determine the location of the capitol, Pasco received only 130 votes out of over 55,000 casts, but it did receive valuable publicity.

The lush bunchgrass of this area attracted stockmen who raised a great number of cattle and horses on the open range, but when the settlers came, barbed wire and the plow replaced bunchgrass and the buckaroo. However, after the sod had been plowed under and the soil planted to wheat, the droughts in the semi-desert area of only 8 to 10 inches of annual precipitation, coupled with high winds, drove many early wheat farmers from the county. Many tried various irrigation schemes, such as water wheels, steam pumps, and even family bucket brigades, to bring water from the rivers to the thirsty land.

Franklin County Irrigation District No, 1 is the only survivor of the many early private irrigation projects that were started and abandoned in Franklin County, sometimes due to bad engineering but more frequently because of inadequate financing. It supplies irrigation water from the Columbia River to 4,000 acres of land west of Pasco. As in other parts of the arid West, the federal irrigation projects in our state have brought stability and prosperity. The Columbia Basin Irrigation Project, which now irrigates 220,000 acres in Franklin County brought by canals from the reservoir behind Grand Coulee Dam.

The dam that made this all possible was completed in 1941, just in time for its vast amount of electric power and the inexhaustible supply of cold Columbia River water to determine the location of the atomic plant at Hanford. The construction of canals for the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project began after World War II ended. Powerful and articulate opponents of the dam had delayed construction of the dam for many years, commencing in the 1920s.

In the early years of Pasco’s history, the dominant economic factor was the million-dollar annual payroll of the Northern Pacific Railway, now merged with other lines to form the Burlington Northern / Santa Fe. One of the most valuable and exotic commodities hauled by it is mentioned in the Pasco Express, in December 1912: “There passed through this city last Saturday one of the fastest trains ever operated across the American continent, and its cargo was the most valuable, composed of 15 express cars loaded with raw silk valued at two million dollars.” This silk traffic was especially prominent in the 1920s and lasted into the 1930s. These trains had the right of way over all other traffic.

Silk is no longer a part of the cargo, but freight traffic on the railroad is constantly growing, and the Amtrak trains have taken on the passenger business. You have noted that our river of destiny has brought us cheap hydroelectric power, thousands of acres of irrigated land, river navigation and recreation, plus processing plants for agricultural products.

World War II brought the Army Reconsignment Depot to Pasco as well as the Naval Air Station, nearly quadrupling our population to around 14,000. Many millions of dollars worth of war material were shipped to the Soviet Union from the Re-consignment Depot via the ports of Seattle and Portland. Later the Port of Pasco bought this installation as war surplus from the General Services Administration of the federal government at a cost of nearly $1,000,000. Many industrial and commercial firms are now tenants of the Port of Pasco in its “Big Pasco” facilities.

The Pasco Naval Air Station was established in 1942 as a training center for naval aviators. In the later stages of World War II, this base was used to rebuild carrier-based squadrons of planes that had been shot up in action against the Japanese in the Pacific. After the War, the city of Pasco purchased the Navy Base from the government for consideration of only $1.00. Today many commercial and industrial tenants are using the facilities there. The landing field, along with the air terminal is now known as the Tri-Cities Airport, operated by the Port of Pasco. Regularly scheduled airline service is provided in this airport.

Pasco’s aviation history goes back to 1926 when Varney Air Lines commenced regular airmail service between Pasco, Washington, and Elko, Nevada. Varney was taken over by United Airlines, and in 1934 United moved their operations out of Pasco to Pendleton, Oregon. Pasco was without regular air service until Empire Air Lines Started regular air service out of Pasco in 1949, being later taken over by Hughes Air West.

Columbia Basin College was opened by the Pasco School District in September 1955 in one of the buildings formerly occupied by the Pasco Naval Air Station. There was an enrollment of 277 students, and there were 23 full-time instructors, as well as some part-time instructors. The college has been growing ever since.

Archeologists from Washington State University discovered a rock shelter on the banks of the Palouse River, several miles upstream from its confluence with the Snake River, in the 1960s. Their finds included human artifacts and parts of a human skull and other fragments of skeletal parts which revealed under the carbon-dating test that they were 10,000 to 12,000 years old. The scientists have named this shelter Marmes rock shelter, and they refer to its inhabitants as Marmes Man, the name Marmes being that of the owner of the farm on which this discovery was made. Unfortunately, that site is now partially inundated by the backwaters of the Snake River impounded behind Lower Monumental Dam, making the site virtually inaccessible.

Connell, Mesa, Eltopia, and Kahlotus are the other towns in the county, all of them quite small and all of them founded at or near the turn of the century. All of these became centers of wheat-growing areas. Mesa and Eltopia, and to some extent, Connell, also are beneficiaries of the development of irrigation farming under the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project.

From these brief highlights of Franklin County history, it is very obvious that our past, present, and future are inextricably interwoven with our great river of the West, our river of destiny, the Columbia, and to a lesser extent the Snake River.

—Walter A Oberst