“Repent, ye sinners! The end of the world is here! Kneel and pray, all ye people! Be ready to meet your Maker!”
No, I’m not talking about Nov. 9, the day after the presidential election.
That was the first paragraph in a Sept. 29, 1957, Tacoma Ledger-News story, which recounted the terror experienced in 1902 when Toledo, Winlock and Castle Rock residents awakened to discover that the sun had failed to rise.
In Chehalis, a bright red streak appeared briefly at dawn, quickly replaced by blackness. Skies over Tacoma and Seattle darkened at midmorning.
Two evangelists at the Patterson hop yard near Olequa found themselves busy Sept. 13, 1902, baptizing panic-stricken converts among the 2,000 hops workers who feared the end had arrived.
The newspaper article quoted the experiences of an unnamed “old-timer.” He had noticed a heavy, bronze-colored cloud floated in from the southwest during the afternoon of Sept. 12 and, when he and a friend returned home about midnight, they commented on the night’s “inky blackness.”
He awoke in the morning to total blackness.
No eclipse was due. They felt no tremors indicating earthquakes or a volcanic eruption. Yet a fine soft white substance fell from the sky like snow; nearly an inch covered the ground.
Some attributed the Dark Day to a black oceanic vapor cloud that moved from Astoria northeast to Castle Rock, Toledo, Chehalis, Tacoma and then Seattle. Others figured the youngest volcano in the Cascade Range had erupted and would cover the community like Pompeii.
By 8:40 a.m., the old-timer said, he was about to remark that it was still dark.
“Before speaking I glanced out of the window and sprang up from the table in alarm. The red glow looked as if the world were on fire. We all rushed outdoors. The entire sky was as red as though we were looking at it through ruby glass. Everything around had a peculiar, ghastly greenish color. Gradually, the sky turned to a copper-green hue and remained like that for most of the day.”
They smelled no smoke and they could see foothills miles away.
Most attribute the unusual phenomena to the state’s most disastrous blaze over a century, the Yacolt Burn, named for dozens of forest fires that killed 38 people near the Lewis River, at least nine near Wind River and 18 in the Columbia River Gorge. The wind-fueled flames traveled 30 miles and devoured 239,000 acres in Clark, Cowlitz and Skamania counties. Ash and smoke limited visibility in Portland to only a block.
When I interviewed my sister’s father-in-law, Alfred Wright, whose family homesteaded in the Forest Hill area east of Washougal, he told about his father, who hauled goods from town with a team and wagon to trade with prospectors working the Last Chance and Washougal gold mines.
He was hauling freight that fateful September day when “a terrible fire that started up at Carson and swept through the Yacolt countryside overtook him.”
“In order to save himself, why, he got off and left the rig,” Wright recalled. “It caught fire along with the team. He left the rig and went down into the Washougal River into a pool there underwater, and he used a weed that grows alongside the river — I call them onion stalks. They’re hollow inside. He had one of those to breathe through so he could get under the water and save himself till the fire went over.”
More than a half century later, the author of the Ledger-News article, Harold Otho Stone, said those who experienced the thrill of the Pacific Northwest’s Dark Day “will always remember the time when the sun forgot to rise.”
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
