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SW WASHINGTON HISTORY
SALTWATER STAGE BY KAREN JOHNSON
M
ention the word “stagecoach” to most people, and they’ll conjure up an image of a round-bellied Concord coach rumbling through rough country full of sidewinders, saguaros, and sand. The Pacific Northwest had stagecoaches, too—no sidewinders or saguaros, but one stagecoach line had its fair share of sand. In fact, it used the ocean beach as a highway. In the 1800s, as it does today, the Long Beach Peninsula separated the ocean proper from Shoalwater Bay (now Willapa Bay) in Pacific County. On the south end of the peninsula was Ilwaco, near the mouth of the Columbia River, and twenty miles north was Oysterville, which served as the county seat. By the early 1870s, a settler by the name of L. A. Loomis decided that a stage line between Ilwaco and
BACKGROUND PHOTO: This massive rock outcropping marks the north side of the mouth of the Columbia River—Cape Disappointment. PHOTO BY AUTHOR.
L. A. Loomis owned and operated the stage on the weather beach; he later established a narrow-gauge railroad line which supplanted the horse-drawn stage. (The inscription below the photo says “L. A. Loomis, Ilwaco, W.T. [Washington Territories]”)
Oysterville could serve several purposes: carrying tourists from Portland who came to the ocean for a summer outing; transporting the U.S. mail from Astoria to Oysterville, and thence to Olympia; and handling freight between the two towns. The freight consisted “largely of beer and saloon supplies” which had the right of way over flour and bacon, and often over paying passengers, too. An old joke around the peninsula was that “there were five saloons in Ilwaco, and only one grocery—the question was, who ate all the groceries?” Loomis’s concern may have been the only stage line whose schedule was determined by the tides. Ships mooring at Ilwaco or Oysterville could dock only when the tide was high, and of course the stage had to be there to meet them. Thus the stage’s schedule varied a HISTORY—cont’d on page 4