JOHN McREAVY'S store at Union City overlooked Hood Canal. McReavy, timber and land baron and railroad builder, had grand plans for making his city a railroad terminus like Tacoma, but things never panned out for his gorgeous spot on the Great Bend.

THE OLD COUNTY courthouse is shown about 1895, many years after Shelton won the battle for the county seat. David Shelton is at far left. The wooden structure was replaced in 1930 by the current courthouse on the same site.

Hood Canal

On Hood Canal one State-of-Mainer, John McReavy, organized a logging industry that floated millions of board feet of Mason County timber up the freeway of Hood Canal to the Puget Mill at Port Gamble.

The first settlers at the Hood Spit, at Union, reported a blockhouse on the beach, perhaps a trading post for the Fort Victoria-supplied Hudson's Bay Company, built in the early decades of the 19th Century.

Early settlers on Hood Canal included Tom Webb, who moved to Union City in 1854 to join his friend Franklin Purdy, who logged first at Clifton and later bought the Union City trading store from brothers Jackson and Vander Perry Morrow. Others included Enoch Willey, who logged at Tahuya and Clifton, and Moses Kirkland, who logged at Clifton with son-in-law Purdy.

But when John McReavy arrived in 1862, the Canal had not seen the likes of this ex-minister. He heard a logging camp on North Bay had gone bust, so he walked to Port Gamble and convinced Puget Mill boss Cyrus Walker to sell him the camp, $7,000 with no money down. By 1865, he finished the North Bay logging and had swamped out a haywire road to Clifton, where he built the Union River Logging and Railroad Company. It was a skid road built with wooden pole rails eight feet apart. Logs hung from the axles of oversize wheels which were dragged by yoked oxen.

In 1868, McReavy bought the trading post at Union City and began purchasing from Puget Mill Company. In 1869 he was elected to the territorial legislature. In 1870, he filed a plat for Union City eight miles long, complete with a McReavy-owned store, Masonic Lodge and Congregational Church. He built a grand, three-story Victorian home above the Hood Spit facing Mount Washington.

McReavy's real competitive advantage, however, lay in the distance from authority. Up to 50 logging camps dotted Hood Canal shores, and many were logging absentee-owned timber. Little camps, just families sometimes, cut a raft of logs with oxen, log jacks, axes, saws and other supplies loaned to them by McReavy. When McReavy sold the logs, he would deduct what these people owed, be it for butter, beef and oil, or rope, saw oil and hand tools. This way, he was able to capture the Canal logging trade with few employees.

The scheme didn't go unnoticed. In 1871, Hazard Stevens, son of Governor Stevens, was hired by the Northern Pacific Railroad as attorney and by the U.S. government as agent to stop the pilfering of timber.

In 1871, the Skokomish Indian Res-ervation was assigned to the Congregational Church. Myron Eells was appointed missionary, brother Edwin Eells the government Indian agent. The missionary work transformed much of tribal life. To build the reservation agency building, ship's carpenter Michael "Mark" Fredson from Maine was hired. He followed brother-in-law Enoch Willey to Tahuya.

McReavy continued to develop the south end of Hood Canal. By 1876, he sent to Michigan for his brother, Ed, who would manage the Clifton camp. By 1878, McReavy owned three logging camps, a ranch growing feed and cattle, a store and a sawmill and wharf at Union City. By 1883, he began building a real Union River Railroad, which would eventually reach eight miles into the cut. By 1883 he finished the Occidental Hotel on Union City waterfront.

This sudden civilization ruptured tribal life. While Indians were skilled and tireless loggers, their life of fishing, gambling and potlatching was destroyed. Congregationalism wasn't winning converts. In November 1881, 40-year-old John Slocum, son of Sa-heh-wamish chief Old Slocum, fell in the woods and broke his neck. But he rose from the dead, not once, but twice, and became revered as the prophet of the Shaker Church.

Slocum employed both tribal ways and Catholic rituals to create a religion that helped the Indians adapt from their traditional life. Finally, in 1892, the 400-member church was formally organized as The Members of the Society Church. They could now legally worship on the reservation and not at Eells' church. Even so, Indians respected Eells. When he died in 1906, his pallbearers were Skokomish Indians.

1884: Steam donkeys and locomotives

Through the 1860s and 1870s, after the Indian war, Sawamish County was sparsely populated. In an 1861 county election, 71 votes were cast. Settlements were tethered together by the United States Postal Service. Ed Miller would row from Olympia on an outgoing tide to Arkada. He would exchange mail and wait

for an incoming tide to row toward Shelton's Point, marked by Davey's young pear orchard. There son Till Shelton built something he called a hotel to board the men who worked his camp down Big Skookum. The carrier finished the day's 20-mile route at Oakland. The next morning, a carrier would ride a horse over the hill, through John McEwan's prairie, over Webb Hill to Union City. Remaining overnight for the morning tide, he'd then row 18 miles up to Seabeck.

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