William T. Packwood

    On the very same day that a young lad, name of Abraham Lincoln, was observing his 4^th birthday in a cabin in Kentucky, the stork delivered a bundle of baby boy to a couple in the hills of southern Virginia. The proud parents bestowed the name William T. upon the newborn. Young Willie also happened to be an only child; he instantly had only seven brothers and a sister.

    By the time the family was complete, Willie was the ninth of fifteen or sixteen children. Elisha and ‘Polly’ Packwood gathered up their brood and moved to Indiana in 1819. There it was that Willie grew into William, and on March 27, 1834 he wed Rhoda Belle Prothero. Later that year the Elisha and William Packwood families moved again, this time to Missouri.Judging by the birthplaces of William and Rhoda’s children, the family lived mostly in northern Missouri for about 10 years.

    William and Elisha must have caught the westering fever again, for on April 19, 1844, William and Rhoda and their four children (Samantha, 1836; Ester, 1838; Martha, 1840; and Noah, 1843) joined Captain Gilliam’s wagon train headed for Oregon. After a distance they joined Captain Ford’s company, making a total of 60 wagons in all. (Daughter Ester Packwood’s recollections of that trek are printed in the Tacoma Daily and Weekly Ledger of June 3, 1892.) Rhoda Packwood was so weak when they started west that she had to be helped into the wagon.

    Fortunately she was a resilient woman, and ended up having 10 more children after she reached the Oregon Country.The wagon train had no trouble with Indians, and only one death on the entire trip. They reached the Willamette Valley in January, 1845. Elisha and William located a claim on Crabtree Creek (about 20 miles southeasterly from Salem, OR), built a cabin and planted a garden, but were scared away by Indians. When they returned to the claim in 1846 it was occupied by the John Crabtree family, so they sold the cabin to Crabtree and moved to Yamhill, County, OR. The William Packwood family apparently was one of the first American families to migrate north of the Columbia River.

    Sometime in 1847 William took a squatter’s claim at or near the site of Centralia, and later that year took a Donation Land Claim on the Nisqually Flats.Packwood joined his father, Elisha, in March, 1849 for a trip to California, and allegedly were at Sutter’s Fort when gold was discovered there. They apparently visited all the important gold centers in California. Descendants said William had a cigar box full of gold when he returned to the homestead in Washington in March, 1851.He petitioned the first commissioner’s of Lewis County (the only county in what became western Washington at that time) for the right to operate a ferry across the Nisqually River. The ferry was in operation within a month. It was also in October, 1851 that the county commissioner’s appointed Packwood to lay out a road between Olympia and Steilacoom.In September, 1852, Miss Elizabeth White began the first school in what was now Thurston county in a room of Packwood’s home.

    On May 14^th, 1853 the pioneers of the area were urging the construction of a wagon road across the mountains to Walla Walla. Nothing had been done by July 9^th, so they took it upon themselves to pursue that purpose. William Packwood was appointed to the committee that worked all summer to clear the Naches Pass route sufficiently that the Longmire wagon train could make their way to the Puget Sound in October, 1853.During the Indian War of 1855/1856, William Packwood was appointed sergeant in charge of 10 men guarding the ferry across the Nisqually River.

    They called their station Fort Raglan. It was said by Kate Gregg in her two-part series on “The Saga of Lolo-Stik” in the October, 1951 Seattle Sunday Times magazines, that friendly Indians shielded Packwood from the warring factions.After his explorations of 1858, noted in the Challenge Corner above, William Packwood was appointed to a committee to lay out an easier route across the Cascades Mountains in 1859. His activities in that regard are also noted above. He was on that trek of discovery when twins Elisha and Pauline were born, March 16, 1861, the last two of his and Rhody’s 14 children. It is not known if Packwood returned to discover Cowlitz Pass later during the summer of 1861, or in 1862.

    One newspaper account says he discovered and located a coal mine in the upper Cowlitz River country in 1862. It may have been on this trip that he or his look-alike son, Noah, discovered Packwood Lake. The Billy Packwood mine on Three Peaks Ridge was said to have been discovered in 1869, but it may have been discovered years earlier.William H. Carlton led the first railroad reconnaissance party across the Cowlitz Pass country in August, 1867. Whether or not William Packwood was employed as a guide or not is unknown.

    In his later book, Hazard Stevens told a story about Mr. Packwood in his essay, “Ascent on Takhoma” that appeared in the November, 1876 Atlantic Monthly: “This interview naturally brought to mind the characteristic incident related of Packwood, the mountain man who, as hunter and prospector, had explored the deepest recesses of the Cascades. He had been engaged to guide a railroad surveying party across the mountains, and just as the party was about to start he approached the chief and demanded an advance to enable him to buy his outfit for the trip. “How much do you want?” asked the chief, rather anxiously, lest Packwood should overdraw his prospective wages. “Well, about two dollars and a half,” was the reply; and at the camp-fire that evening, being asked if he had bought his outfit, Packwood, thrusting his hand into his pocket, drew forth and exhibited with perfect seriousness and complacency his entire outfit, - a jack-knife and a plug of tobacco.”One source gives the year 1867, another 1869 when Packwood sold his homestead in Thurston County to Isaac Hawk (namesake of Hawks Prairie in the Lacey area) and moved to Snohomish County where he prospected in the North Cascades for one summer.

    In the autumn of 1871 the Packwood family homesteaded in the Hannaford Creek area.   He proved up on that homestead, sold it, and settled on another homestead in the same area.Packwood was among the prospectors who filed a claim along the Cowlitz Trail where it crosses Jug Lake Creek in September, 1875. Apparently they had a number of cabins between the trail and Summit Creek, but there is no evidence of those structures today.D.D. Clarke, Assistant Engineer of the Northern Pacific Railroad surveys in the summit country wrote a letter to his superior, Colonel Isaac Smith, dated August 28, 1880: “During the progress of our survey Wm. Packwood, the pioneer explorer in this region was in our camp for a few days, and from him I gained such information regarding the location of the Pass thorough which the survey was made in 1867 by W.H. Carlton in 1867 crossed the summit as led me to believe that previous information on that point was incorrect.

    The statement of Mr. Packwood being confirmed by some observations which I had made a few days previously (it) was deemed advisable to continue our survey along the crest of the mountain as far as the so-called Carlton Pass.At a distance of eight miles we reached a point near the old Packwood or Cowlitz trail, which Mr. Packwood described as being the Cowlitz Pass.”William Packwood either took or sent a sample of anthracite coal mined from near Packwood Lake to the New Orleans Exposition of 1885-1886. The Washington State Museum has ‘A Certificate of Merit’ to verify that claim.‘Uncle Billy” Packwood, as he was fondly known, was said to have gone prospecting in the Cascades for 28 successive summers after he and Longmire ‘discovered’ the upper Cowlitz valley.

    The following item in the Lewis County Bee of August 19, 1887 reads:   Uncle William Packwood left Chehalis for the mountains on the 9th inst. with several pack animals laden with camp supplies. Lucky is he who shares this old mountaineers confidence. He can tell more of the Cascade Mountains and the hidden treasures therein than any living man. Yet will he? It was said that William Packwood suffered from Parkinson’s disease. If he did, he didn’t let it bother him too much on his wilderness trips. Age, however, was catching up with him. An item in the Chehalis Bee of August 24, 1893 read: Rufus Packwood who is known to all the old timers was badly hurt Monday while coming down from the Big Bottom on horseback.

    His horse threw him and dragged him quite a distance near Morton. Mr. Packwood, who is nearly 80 years old, was returning from a prospecting trip.The newspaper got the name wrong, William Packwood was 80; Rufus would have only been 46 in 1893.Soon after that incident, William and Rhody moved to the Little Rock area to live with their daughter, Samantha Kroll. They were living there when he died on December 11^th, 1897 (according to the headstone, December 13^th according to another source); Rhody followed on September9, 1899. Both are buried nearby in the Mima Prairie Pioneer Cemetery.