Over the years several routes have crossed Snoqualmie Pass. Trails gave way to roads and roads were replaced with freeways but, in places, the old still remains. Between the Denny Creek exit and the Pass an old road runs up the valley just as it has for many years. Take a few minutes to slow down and enjoy what used to be the latest thing.
With the outbreak of first the Indian Wars and then the Civil War building a road over the Pass was set aside. A group of men, possibly miners, in 1858 cleared a trail all the way up to the pass, and others followed, but travel was never easy. But in 1865 a surveying party from Seattle along with a Snoqualmie Indian guide visited the pass to make a plan to widen the trail to a wagon road. The party included William Perkins, L. V. Wyckoff, Arthur Denny and John Ross. With a plan now developed Seattle residents raised $2,500 for the project. William Perkins and a crew of 20 men were hired to construct the road from what was called Rangers Prairie at the site of present day North Bend to Snoqualmie Pass. The road was constructed during 1865 and the first wagons crossed the pass. On the East side of the Pass just a trail existed, and the route along Lake Keechelus was not easy. Settlers often used barges and rafts to cross the lake.
However there wasn't a connection from Rangers Prairie to the City of Seattle. A road already ran from the Black River near the present day Renton to Seattle. King County voters in a June 1866 election decided 115 for and 4 against to raise $2,000 to extend the road from Black River to Rangers Prairie. They hired Henry Manchester in June of 1867 to extend the road at $130 per mile. On October 7, 1867, the wagon road was completed from Seattle to Ellensburg. Additional funds were used to maintain and improve the route so that by 1870 about $20,000 had been spent on the road.
The first to take advantage of the wagon road were meat dealers, who conducted many cattle drives through Snoqualmie Pass from the ranches of Eastern Washington.
Seattle pioneer Henry Yesler led one of many efforts to improve the road. The group got permission to run a lottery with some very nice prizes, including Yesler's own sawmill as the grand prize. But due to some questions about how much of the money would actually go toward road building as well as legal questions about the raffle, the goverment revoked permission. Yesler reportedly kept much of the $30,000 dollars from the sale of the $5 tickets in spite of efforts by the Territorial Legislature and the Commissioners of King County to have at least some go to road building.
In 1884 a private company in Ellensburg was given permission to charge a toll on use of the road to help pay for it's maintenance and improvements. The toll was in effect until 1887 when the first rail crossing of the Cascades was completed. Tollgate Farm in North Bend was one of the toll booths.
With the completion of the Northern Pacific railroad line through the Cascades in 1887, interest in the road over Snoqualmie Pass all but disappeared. Most passengers and freight preferred traveling on the railroad to traveling along the wagon road. The Seattle & Walla Walla Trail & Wagon Road Company of Ellensburg maintained the original wagon road for a few years but it fell into disuse and disrepair. But just as the railroad displaced travel by horse and wagon, another method of transportation would soon do the same to the railroads.
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