7. Early Routes

Page Index

• River and Trails

• Oregon Trail

• Steamboats (1851)

• Hardin Chenoweth Railroad (1851)

• Cascades Portage Railroad (1855)

• Kilborn's Portage Wagon Road (1856)

• The Oregon Pony (1862)

• Axenstrasse (1865)

• Wire Trail (1868)

• The Dalles to Sandy River Wagon Road (1872)

• 1882 Oregon Railway & Navigation Line

• County "Market" Roads

• Lyle Convict Road (Washington State Road 8)

• 1911 Bridal Veil to Hood River County Line

• Yeon's Shellrock Road

• Lake Washington Boulevard

• Maryhill

March 1, 2020

In mid-2015, as I was wrapping up the bulk of the research, exploration, and "second unit" shooting on my documentary, I started thinking a lot about how to write and edit the film. One of the main themes I came up with is that the Historic Columbia River Highway is only one incarnation, and a relatively brief one, at that, of a highway that has existed in the gorge for centuries, one that is constantly evolving, from the old Native American trails on through to today's I-84 and the State Trail, still under construction.

Admittedly, this approach is lightly inspired by how Samuel C. Lancaster approached his book, The Columbia: America's Great Highway.

While the main body of the film would have focused on the human history of the highway's early days and some of the issues around the construction of the new State Trail, I wanted to give a fair amount of coverage to the earlier and later routes of this constantly shifting thoroughfare through the gorge, where the Columbia River Gorge itself essentially IS the highway.

While building this site, I'd always thrown up some tidbits about the early and later routes of the highway, especially the later, since they often have concurrent alignments with the older trails, rails, and roads, but moving ahead, I will probably be filling up these sections a lot more.

While still in the first quarter of 2020, I am not sure what fate will hold for the movie plans, but I still want to be completing the research I need to do to make the film the best it can be if that is what does lay ahead. For now, though, I am going to just focus on getting the site rebuilt. After that, we'll see what happens.

Finally, a bit of a bookkeeping note... This site is mostly set up on an west to east geographical structure following the route of the highway, so where the early and later routes converge, or are an important part of the story of the HCRH, I cover those locations in the main highway pages, usually in some detail.

The pages in these sections are dedicated a little more to the general history of these routes unless they, like the Washington roads, are completely disconnected from the CRH.

Samuel C. Lancaster, The Columbia: America's Great Highway

This great mountain range one mile and more in height has always been a barrier until now to wagon traffic. The earlier settlers used a trail and portage, or else crossed the range south of Mount Hood on the old Barlow trail. They scrambled up the east side of the mountains as best they could and on reaching the summit cut down a tree and tied it on behind the wagon to serve as a brake to hold them back when they slid down the western slopes.

CLICK HERE to continue exploring the highway