Swanson's Landing Traditional Cache
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(small)
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This is a small cache (no, it's not a medicine bottle, YH)that can hold small trade items. The pens in the cache are also trade items, so BYOP.
In 1857 Swanson's Landing was the starting point for the Southern Pacific Railroad, one of the earliest of all Texas railroads. The rails, cars, and other railroad accoutrements were brought in by riverboats. Swansons made the ties. The young people of Marshall began riding the Southern Pacific to Swanson's Landing, where they would swim, dance, picnic, and go boating. At day's end they would board the train for home. In 1861 Texas joined the Confederacy. Among the first units to muster was the Marshall Guards, commanded by Capt. Frederick Bass. That year C. E. Hynson, superintendent of the railroad, reported that the railroad had transported to Swanson's Landing 33,000 sacks of corn and 4,274 bales of cotton. With the fall of Vicksburg, Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith ordered the rails to be taken up between Jonesville and Swanson's Landing and used as an extension from Jonesville to Shreveport. On February 12, 1869, the palatial sidewheeler, the Mittie Stephens, burned and sank near the landing. Out of 107 passengers and crew (not knowing that they were in wading distance from the shore) sixty-one men, women, and children perished. The ship was also carrying a large amount of gold to pay the federal troops occupying Jefferson. With the removal of the track from Swanson's Landing, the shifting of the riverboat to the boomtown of Jefferson, and the clearing in 1873 of the great raft from the Red River, the demise of Swanson's Landing as a port was inevitable. In 1990 most of the land owned by Peter Swanson still belonged to his descendants.
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Additional Hints
(No hints available.)