In the summer of 1851, while most of America was still reeling from the California Gold Rush, a Wisconsin transplant named Francis A. Chenoweth was building something revolutionary along the treacherous rapids of the Columbia River. His creation was humble—little more than a mule, a wooden cart, and rough-hewn planks laid across trestles—yet it represented the first railroad in what would become Washington State. This crude portage tramway, charging 75 cents per 100 pounds of freight or passengers, was the seed from which an entire transportation empire would grow.
The story of Washington’s first railroads is one of ambition colliding with geography, of civic pride overcoming economic reality, and of communities willing to stake their futures on ribbons of steel. It’s a tale that begins with a mule-powered tramway and ends with transcontinental giants reshaping the Pacific Northwest forever.
The Cascade Portage: Where It All Began
The Columbia River’s Cascade Rapids presented early settlers with a formidable obstacle. Steamboats simply couldn’t navigate the swift, churning waters near present-day Stevenson. Passengers and freight had to be laboriously unloaded, portaged around the rapids, and reloaded onto another vessel—a time-consuming and costly process that begged for a better solution.
Francis Chenoweth, who had moved west from Wisconsin in 1849, saw opportunity in this bottleneck. In July 1851, he began operating his portage railroad on the north bank of the Columbia River. The operation was primitive by any standard: wooden rails mounted on a bed of planks, with a simple flat car pulled by a single mule. The railroad ran somewhere between two and six miles, depending on which historical account you believe, ferrying goods and people from one end of the rapids to the other.
“The first railroad of any kind built in Oregon (later Washington) was a wooden tramway constructed on the north side of the Columbia River around the Cascades in 1850 by F. A. Chenoweth.” — Historian John B. Horner, 1919
Chenoweth sold his railroad to the Bradford brothers in 1853, who extended it and upgraded the operation. By the early 1860s, the mule had been replaced by small steam locomotives running on iron-strapped wooden rails, and later steel rails. The humble portage railroad would operate in various forms until 1908, when surrounding standard-gauge routes made it obsolete. But by then, it had already sparked something much larger.
Seattle’s Defiant Response: The Seattle & Walla Walla
The seeds of Washington’s railroad fever were sown in disappointment. On July 14, 1873, Seattle’s leading citizens gathered at Yesler Mill to hear news they were certain would transform their city. Arthur Denny opened a telegram from Northern Pacific Railroad executives that read simply: “We have located the terminus on Commencement Bay.” Tacoma, not Seattle, would be the railroad’s Pacific terminus.
Seattle’s response was immediate and characteristic of what locals would come to call the “Seattle Spirit.” If the Northern Pacific wouldn’t come to them, they’d build their own railroad. On May 1, 1874, nearly every able-bodied man in town turned out at Steele’s Landing on the Duwamish River to begin construction of the Seattle & Walla Walla Railroad. Women prepared enormous meals to sustain the volunteer workforce. The goal was ambitious to the point of fantasy: build a railroad across the Cascade Mountains to connect Seattle with the wheat fields of Walla Walla in eastern Washington.
Reality proved more stubborn than ambition. By October 1874, volunteers had graded twelve miles of track, but the dream of crossing the Cascades remained just that—a dream. The project needed professional help and serious capital. Enter James M. Colman, a lumber mill owner who staked $20,000 of his own money on the venture. Colman brought in labor contractor Chin Gee Hee, who organized crews of Chinese immigrant workers to continue construction. Chin would later return to China and become a renowned railway entrepreneur in his own right, but in the 1870s, his crews were building Seattle’s future, one rail at a time.
The railroad reached Renton’s coal fields in March 1877, and by February 1878, it extended 21 miles to Newcastle. The Seattle & Walla Walla never got anywhere near Walla Walla, but what it did accomplish was transformative. The railroad transported 400 to 800 tons of coal daily from the Newcastle mines to Seattle’s waterfront, fueling the city’s steamships and economy. By 1878, five trains ran daily between Newcastle and Seattle; by August, that number had grown to eight, with regular passenger service added.
“It is the initial of mighty events…the connection by railroad of ocean commerce with the inland seas, whereby an inexhaustible mine of wealth is opened to perpetual use.” — Puget Sound Dispatch, 1872
The Transcontinental Era Arrives
While Seattle built its coal hauler, the Northern Pacific was slowly making good on its promise to Tacoma. Congress had chartered the railroad in 1864, offering the largest land grant in American history—60 million acres in a checkerboard pattern along the route from Minnesota to Puget Sound. The Civil War and financial panics delayed construction, but by the early 1880s, steel rails were finally approaching Washington Territory from the east.
The work was brutal. Laying tracks through Washington’s Cascade Range demanded more than 20,000 laborers and claimed lives along the way. The harshest winter in half a century arrived in 1886, just as crews began blasting a tunnel through Stampede Pass. For over two years, workers attacked the mountain from both ends, using dynamite to carve a two-mile passage through solid rock. The tunnel would eliminate cumbersome switchbacks that forced trains to zigzag at higher elevations, but the strenuous conditions led to constant turnover—one contractor complained he always had “three crews: one coming, one drilling, and one quitting.”
On September 8, 1883, Northern Pacific President Henry Villard drove a golden spike at Gold Creek, Montana, ceremonially completing the transcontinental line. By 1887, the railroad had connected Tacoma to the rest of the nation via Stampede Pass. Seattle’s connection would come via a roundabout route until later improvements were made.
The arrival of transcontinental rail service transformed Washington Territory virtually overnight. As historian Carlos A. Schwantes noted, the new Portland-to-Minneapolis line reduced a journey that once required several months to just five or six days. Immigration exploded. Washington’s population jumped from about 75,000 in 1880 to over 357,000 by 1890—a nearly fivefold increase in just one decade.
The Railroad Reshapes a Region
The railroads didn’t just transport people and goods; they fundamentally restructured Washington’s economy and settlement patterns. Railroad companies distributed millions of flyers and pamphlets across the eastern states and Europe, promising fertile land and endless opportunity. They hired agents to recruit emigrants, sold them land grants along the routes, charged them fares to reach Washington, and then shipped their produce back east at a profit.
New towns sprouted along the rail lines like mushrooms after rain. Spokane emerged as a major railroad hub in eastern Washington. Centralia and Chehalis developed as important junctions in the southwest. Railroad companies often platted these towns themselves, naming them after company officials or engineers, then promoted them vigorously to generate traffic and revenue.
The logging industry, already significant, exploded with railroad access. Timber that once had to be floated downriver or left to rot in remote forests could now be efficiently shipped to markets across the nation. Eastern Washington’s wheat fields, previously limited by the difficulty of getting grain to market, suddenly had direct rail connections to Pacific ports and beyond.
But the railroads’ power also bred resentment. By the time Washington achieved statehood in 1889, many citizens—especially farmers—viewed the railroad companies with deep suspicion. The companies controlled vast land grants that citizens felt should have gone to settlers. They charged what the market would bear, sometimes with rates that seemed exploitative to those dependent on rail service. When Washington’s constitutional convention convened, farmer delegates pushed for strict regulations on railroad rates and profits, reflecting widespread concern about corporate power.
A Legacy Written in Steel
From Francis Chenoweth’s mule-powered tramway in 1851 to the completion of the transcontinental lines in the 1880s and beyond, Washington’s early railroads did more than move freight and passengers. They connected isolated communities, sparked population booms, enabled resource extraction on an industrial scale, and integrated the Pacific Northwest into the national—and global—economy.
The Seattle & Walla Walla, despite never reaching its namesake city, proved that local determination could accomplish the impossible when larger forces proved indifferent. The Northern Pacific, Great Northern, and later the Milwaukee Road would build the great transcontinental routes, but it was those first humble efforts—a mule on wooden rails beside the Columbia, volunteers grading track in the rain, Chinese workers laying steel toward Newcastle—that set Washington on its path to becoming an economic powerhouse.
Today, when container trains roll through the Columbia River Gorge or freight cars climb through the Cascades, they’re following routes first imagined in an era when a single mule pulling a cart represented the cutting edge of transportation technology. The mule is long gone, and so are most of the early pioneer railroads, but their legacy endures in every mile of track, every tunnel through the mountains, and every thriving city that owes its existence to the day the railroad arrived.
Sources & Further Reading:
- Railroads In Washington State: Map, History, Abandoned Lines – American-Rails.com
- Railroad Development in the Seattle/Puget Sound Region, 1872-1906 – HistoryLink.org
- Francis Chenoweth builds Washington’s first railroad in July 1851 – HistoryLink.org
- Railroading in Vancouver and Southwest Washington – HistoryLink.org
- Seattle & Walla Walla Railroad and Navigation Company – HistoryLink.org
- Seattle & Walla Walla Railroad reaches Newcastle on February 5, 1878 – HistoryLink.org
- Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest – Railroads and Industrialism
- Pennsylvania of the West – Washington 1889 – WA Secretary of State
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