Pasco: Junction of the Northern Pacific

Pasco sits at the confluence of the Snake and Columbia rivers, one of the great river junctions of the Pacific Northwest and a site of human habitation for thousands of years. The Northern Pacific Railway arrived in the early eighteen-eighties and named the place for Cerro de Pasco, a mining city in Peru where its engineer Virgil Bogue had worked. The railroad made Pasco a junction where lines from Seattle, Portland, and Spokane all met, and the town was built around a massive rail yard and depot.

A predecessor camp called Ainsworth, a construction boomtown at the Snake's mouth, was literally disassembled and moved to the new Pasco site once the track was laid. Until World War Two, Pasco was the largest of what would become known as the Tri-Cities, before Richland's Manhattan Project expansion changed the regional balance of power.