Timber Country At The Foot Of The Cascades
In the Snoqualmie Valley where the logging camps met the hop farms, the Foster family made one of its last American stops before the border crossing north
Where It Is and Why People Came
North Bend sits at the upper end of the Snoqualmie Valley in King County, where the valley floor begins to narrow and the Cascade foothills press in from both sides, and Mount Si rises so dramatically to the north that it dominates every prospect from the town. The Snoqualmie River forks just above the townsite, and the land between the forks — the old Snoqualmie Prairie, ancestral home of the Snoqualmie people — is as flat and fertile as anything in the mountain country of western Washington. It was the kind of place that rewarded whoever arrived with good timing and a clear sense of what the land could do.
The first people who came in numbers were loggers. By 1877 there were twelve logging operations on the Snoqualmie River, and by 1886 the camps employed 140 men and sent millions of board feet of timber downstream — some of it floated over Snoqualmie Falls, some rafted down to the mills at Everett and Puget Sound. The trees were immense, the kind of old-growth Douglas fir and cedar that eastern loggers had never seen and Pacific Northwest loggers quickly learned to regard as a kind of bottomless wealth. It was not bottomless, but it was deep enough to build an industry and a community on.
The town was formally platted in 1889 by Will Taylor, first as Snoqualmie, then Mountain View, then North Bend — the name settling on the fact that the town sat on a pronounced bend in the river, in the north end of the valley. The Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern Railway reached the upper valley the same year, giving the logging camps and the farms that were beginning to follow them a connection to the markets at the Sound.
A Timber Claim on the Edge of Mount Josiah
The land on the edges of the valley — the timbered slopes climbing toward the Cascade ridges, the benches above the river bottom — was available under the Timber and Stone Act of 1878, which allowed any citizen to claim 160 acres of forest land for $2.50 an acre, provided it was more useful for timber than for farming. In a valley like the Snoqualmie, where the bottomland was flat and farmable and the hillsides were not, this created a clear geography: farms in the valley, timber claims on the slopes. A man with capital could file on a timber claim, log it off, and sell the lumber; a man without capital could at least establish a presence on the land and wait for circumstances to improve.
The slopes around what was sometimes called Mount Josiah — one of the named features in the upper valley country above North Bend — were part of this timber claim geography. To hold a claim there in the 1880s or early 1890s was to be in the business of the edge: the edge of the farm country, the edge of the logged-off land, the edge of the wild country that the Cascades preserved above the treeline. It required a particular combination of ambition and patience.
North Bend Today
North Bend today is best known to much of the world as the filming location of *Twin Peaks*, David Lynch's surrealist television drama of the early 1990s, which used the town and the surrounding mountains as the backdrop for its story of murder and hidden darkness in a Pacific Northwest logging community. The Salish Lodge at Snoqualmie Falls, where much of the show was filmed, draws visitors who make the pilgrimage to stand where Agent Cooper stood and look at the falls. The Double R Diner — the Mar T Cafe in the series — is still operating.
Behind the *Twin Peaks* tourism, North Bend is a small city of about 8,000 on the edge of the Cascades, the last town before the Interstate 90 mountain passes, a gateway to hiking and climbing and skiing. Mount Si, which dominates the northern skyline, is one of the most heavily used hiking trails in Washington State. The valley fl
The Hops Boom and the Snoqualmie Hop Ranch
Before the logging era fully dominated the Snoqualmie Valley's identity, there was a moment when it looked as though hops might define the place instead. In 1882, a partnership of Puget Sound investors — using land purchased from Jeremiah Borst on the Snoqualmie Prairie — created what would eventually grow to a 1,500-acre operation, with 900 acres devoted solely to hops. It was marketed as the largest hop ranch in the world, and for a decade that claim may not have been far wrong.
The hops economy of the 1880s Pacific Northwest was real and substantial. Brewers from San Francisco to London wanted Cascade hops, and the Snoqualmie Valley grew them in quantity and quality. The Snoqualmie Hop Ranch was the showpiece, but smaller hop yards ran up and down the valley on land that the farmers and the timber claimants were still sorting out between them. It was a crop that suited the valley's moist climate and the bottomland's fertility, and for the families who worked it — harvesting in the late summer, with crews of Native workers from the surrounding country joining the permanent farm labour — it provided an income that straight farming could not always match.
The boom collapsed in the early 1890s. A combination of market saturation, a devastating aphid infestation, and the general agricultural depression of the decade broke the hop industry across the Pacific Northwest in a few bad seasons. The Snoqualmie Hop Ranch went into relative obscurity. The valley went back to its timber and its dairy farms and the gradual filling-in of the town that the railroad had made possible.
Logging Camps at Olney and Fall City
The logging camps that spread up the Snoqualmie Valley in the 1880s were their own kind of community — temporary, male-dominated, organized around the rhythms of the cut, with their own social culture and their own relationship to the nearest towns. The camps at Olney and at Fall City (just below Snoqualmie Falls) were part of this network, feeding logs into the river system and the rail cars that carried them to the mills. The men who worked them came from the logging cultures of Maine and Michigan and New Brunswick — experienced timber workers who had cut the eastern forests to nothing and followed the industry west.
The connection between the Snoqualmie Valley logging industry and the wider world was demonstrated memorably when a log from the valley was sent to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago — a single massive Douglas fir section chosen to represent the scale of the Pacific Northwest forests to an eastern audience that had nothing in its own experience to measure them against. Whether you could find a photograph of that log at the fair would be a question worth pursuing — it was the valley's calling card to the world.
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