C. C. VanArsdol 88, Engineer, Taken By Death
Noted Clarkston Pioneer Succumbs at Home After Long Illness
Surveyed Highways and Railroads
Death claimed Cassius C. VanArsdol, 88, a civil engineer whose name has been linked with projects of magnitude, among them, being the Blue Mountain Highway, Lewiston Spiral Highway, North & South Highway system of Idaho, and numerous routes for railroads in the United States and Canada, died yesterday morning at 9 at his home, Thirteenth and Libby streets, following a lingering illness of several weeks. He has been in failing health for the last five years.
He filed the first water right for Clarkston property.
He and Mrs. VanArsdol were the parents of the first white child, Maurice, born in Clarkston, Dec. 18, 1896, and he is one of three to be the first to receive an engineering degree from the University of Iowa, in 1876.
Modest and perenially shrinking publicity for his notable feats, Mr. VanArsdol was always looked upon with respect by all who knew him. Legislators, financiers, governors, and other dignitaries have driven many miles to pay tribute to him.
FATHER OF HIGHWAY
Called the "father of the Blue Mountain highway," a banquet attended by the governor of Idaho and representatives of the governors of Washington and Oregon and a score of notables was served in his honor May 15, 1937, here, attended by more than 400.
Of the original incorporates of the Lewiston Water & Power Co., Van Arsdale, who engineered the plan to take water from Asotin Creek to the Clarkston Valley, was the last survivor. He tested the flow of Asotin Creek and visualized the development of Clarkston through irrigation from Asotin Creek.
Born Aug. 19, 1852, in Muncie, Ind., the son of Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Van Arsdol, he was two years old when the family moved to Clarinda, Iowa.
He graduated from the University of Iowa in 1876 and started his civil engineering career that brought fame and the development of this district.
TRAVELED THROUGHOUT THE WEST
He first took a job under E.A. Clark and his abilities soon became apparent. His duties took him to nearly every state in the West, surveying proposed routes for the Union Pacific railroad. He was one of the party to survey railroad routes to Denver, Cheyenne, and various parts of the Northwest.
President C. H. Hays of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad of Canada paid a glowing tribute to the work of Mr. Van Arsdol in the edition of World's Work of April 1910. He said, in part, as follows:
"To find the route through the mountains I secured the assistance of the foremost railway pathfinder on the American continent -- C.C. VanArsdol. For months at a time, not a word was heard of his whereabouts or welfare of the party which had gone into the heart of the great mountain range. At last, came the brief message"
" Can get through range via Yellowstone at 3,7000 feet with 4 - 10 grade one summit."
NOTABLE FEAT
"That was all. Crossing the mountain at a grade only equivalent to 1 percent, or 21 feet to the miles, was worth three years of waiting. The distinction of this remarkable engineering achievement will never leave the surveying engineer who discovered the Yellowhead Route."
Mr. VanArsdol's duties took him to Yuba City, Calif., and there he was married on April 29, 1886.
A year later he surveyed the Blue Mountain highway south of the Grand Ronde, a road which is assured completion within the next two years.
Mr. Van Arsdol served as president of the original Blue Mountain Tri-State Highway Association organized in 1917, of which William Huyette, Clarkston, was the secretary.
BENEFIT DISTRICT
Mr. Van Arsdol revealed his genius in civil engineering, plotting the Lewiston spiral route, the North & south highway near the rugged Salmon River Country, and other projects during that period.
He moved to Lewiston in 1893 and, after checking the Asotin Creek flow, filed the first water right at Asotin that same year. After the project for bringing water to the Clarkston valley was developed in 1895, he and his family moved from Lewiston to Clarkston on Oct. 18, 1896, where they have since resided.
Survivors include the widow, Della, Thirteenth & Libby; three sons, Vern, employed with the Bell Telephone Co. at San Mateo, Calif.; Maurice, Engineer at Seattle, and Fred W., state game protector at Yakima; two sisters, Mrs. Sallie Burrell, Albany, Ore., and Mollie E. Woods, Clarinda, and a brother, George, Coin, Iowa.
Fred and Mrs. Fred Van Arsdol and family arrived last night and Mr. and Mrs. Maurice Van Arsdol are due to arrive today from Seattle; They reported that Vern Van Arsdol will not be able to come because of a heart ailment.
The body is at Merchants Chapel, where the funeral arrangement is pending.
Lewiston Tribune Wednesday, February 26, 1941 pg. 6
=====
Located Spiral Highway
Pathfinder Van Arsdol Laid Out Clarkston
He was lean and land - a man and a half tall but only a man wide.
He came into the Valley in the 1880s -- possibly on the Uniontown stage -- and he left it in 1941 - almost surely in a heavenly carriage.
In between, he made an indelible mark on the landscape of North Central Idaho.
Officially he was Cassius C. Van Arsdol, but people knew him as just C. C. He is mostly remembered for doing the location work for the Lewiston Spiral Highway. More notable, perhaps, is the fact that he turned Jawbone Flat into the city of Clarkston. He trudged the high peaks along the backbone of the continent looking for passes. And he followed the valleys of western rivers in search of the right of way.
He located and built both rail lines and highways and he developed an irrigation system. And he built a small levee but it was not one of his proud achievements. Once he built a small levee but it was not one of his proud achievements. The waves beat it down and the water flooded downtown Lewiston. That's about all there was to Lewiston then.
Charles M. Hayes, the president of Canada's Grand Trunk Pacific, termed him "the foremost railway pathfinder in the American continent."
In 1889 when Virgil G. Bogue, the Union Pacific's chief engineer, was seeking to build a rail line through the Feather River Canyon in California, Van Arsdol took a look and said it could be done.
Bogue wasn't impressed at first. Four other engineers, he told Van Arsdol, had said it couldn't be done.
"I heard about your engineers up on the stage roads," Van Arsdol replied, "but damned if I ever saw their tracks down in the canyon."
Born near Muncie, Ind., on Aug. 19, 1851, Van Arsdol spent his youth on an Iowa farm. He graduated from the University of Iowa in 1876 and got his first railroad job two years later as what he described as "black flag" on a St. Louis, Kansas City & Northern survey party.
He was a quiet man using words the way a miser would if they cost two bits apiece, but he was intelligent and ambitious. When he applied for a job with the Union Pacific at Omaha in 1881, he took along a set of blueprints he had made, hoping they would impress UP Chief Engineer, J. Blickensdurfer.
"What's this?" Blickensdurfer asked. He'd never seen blueprints before. Van Arsdol went to work s Blickendurfer's assistant.
He became head of UP's Colorado division in 1885 and began the exploration work that made him the nation's top expert on western canyons and mountain passes.
He married Della Barada in Yuba City, Calif., on April 29, 1886. In the winter of 1889-1887, he was called upon to complete the construction of 95 miles of railroad track from Cheyenne to Chugwater, Wyo., after other engineers had bogged down.
He went without sleep as the crews pushed the tracks ahead through snowdrifts, blizzards, and cold, meeting the completion deadline and saving UP the $400,000 in bonds voted by the people of Cheyenne.
Van Arsdol moved on west then, into the country that was to become his home. He did surveys for the UP in the canyons of the Snake and Salmon rivers, and he switched sides during the Battle of the Clearwater. That's when UP and Northern Pacific were fighting-- literally, for rival construction crews sometimes would engage in a free-for-all -- for control of the Clearwater country.
There later was a shotgun marriage between UP and NP, and their offspring is named Camas Prairie Railroad.
Van Arsdol changed over to NP and charge of most of the NP track construction in the Clearwater region from 1889 through 1903. One of those lines came down from the Palouse to Lewiston.
Van Arsdol lived first at Pullman but he moved to Lewiston in 1893. NP was in receivership from 1892 to 1897, and he was at loose ends, taking odd jobs to keep busy. One of them was a two-week survey of Asotin county for the Oregon-Washington Irrigating Co.
In the process he got an idea: He'd tap Asotin Creek to bring water to the dry soil of Jawbone Flat and sell land to farmers. He didn't want the landlords to think it was a railroad project and raise their prices, so he invited others into the deal. They filed for water rights in 1893 and then bogged down on financing.
Earlier Van Arsdol had provided information on UP lines to the company president, Charles Francis Adams. Adams now had left the railroad and was speculating in western land, including some at Lewiston. Van Arsdol sold him on the Jawbone Flat plan and he paid $50,00 for 3,000 acres of land. Adams also got the Wheeler-Berker Syndicate of Boston to invest $200,000.
The result was the Lewiston Water and Power Co., incorporated at Asotin in December of 1895. The Boston Syndicate sent out E. H. Libby to be president of the company. Van Arsdol was a director, secretary, and engineer. A ditch was dug from Asotin Creek, and water churned into Jawbone Flat on July 18, 1896. Van Arsdol laid out the streets of the town that was destined to become Clarkston. One street is named Libby. Another is Van Arsdol. And it's Charles Francis Adams High School. But Clarkston never had a railroad.
For a short time during that period, Van Arsdol was involved with more water than he wanted. It was 1894 and the Snake and Clearwater rivers were rising at Lewiston. The mayor asked Van Arsdol to take charge of the construction of a levee. He did, building it out of materials at hand -- driftwood and bags of sand.
The rivers rose and the townspeople came by to look and call him Father Noah. Then the wind came up and the waved beat against the levee until it collapsed and the water flooded the city.
Van Arsdol's next project at Lewiston was more successful, supervision of the first building at Lewiston Normal School, now Lewis-Clark State College.
The Van Arsdols moved into a shack on a 15-acre sagebrush flat at what is now Clarkston's 15th and Chestnut Sts. on Oct. 17, 1896. There was one other shack on that side of the river then, the office of the LW&P, Co. A horse herder lived in a tent near the Snake River.
At their new home, Van Arsdol, the survey specialist and railroad builder, wired together a log corral for his wife's chickens. Coyotes came in the night and killed all of them. Van Arsdol had no better luck with his irrigation and landscape scheme.
He went back to NP when it came out of receivership in1897, selling his stock in the development company for $4,000.
From 1903 to 1914 Van Arsdol was division engineer on the Grand Trunk Pacific's project from Edmonton, Alta., to Prince Rupert, B.C. on the Pacific Ocean. The search for the best route took him three years and paid off fabulously.
He notified Grand Trunk President Hayes that track could be built through the Canadian Rockies at Yellowstone Pass at the 3,700- foot level at a grade of one percent.
Because of his surveying and engineering feats, he was of interest to Canadian newsmen. The Toronto Globe described him as "very quiet, non-commital, easy-going" and said he had the "marks of the outdoor world upon him."
A writer for Success Magazine wrote that van Arsdol was "low-voiced, unassuming, long and lean with a wide-brimmed black hat and bronzed, quizzical, seamed face under it." It also said he had "a bold, roving mind" and had "technical digested and assimilated."
He came to Clarkston in 1914, after the Yellowstone Pass triumph, and worked as a civil engineer. In that capacity, he did the location work for the Lewiston Spiral Highway as well as the Ehitebird, Winchester, Alpowa, and Rattlesnake grades and some others less notable. He was a prime mover on the Clarkston to Enterprise Highway and was the first president of the Blue Mountain Tri-State Highway Assn.
He died at his Clarkston home on Feb. 26, 1941, at the age of 89. In his obituary the Tribune paid a final tribute:
"After retirement, he sat in his Morris chair, smoking, napping, telling of and living again the days on an Iowa farm, the Cheyenne job, the days in Canada."
"Death came on Tuesday to an old man. The brief, bright moment of C. C. Van Arsdol was ended."
By Johnnie Johnson
Lewiston Tribune Thursday, October 27, 1977 pg. 30
===
1861 arrived in Lewiston - Clarkston - engineered diversion dam along Asotin Creek in (Headgate Dam -1906) constructed a irrigation canal to channel water from Asotin Creek along an 18 mile "Big Ditch" and 24-foot long tunnel through Swallows.
Left by jds on 29 Aug 2022
Noted Clarkston Pioneer Succumbs at Home After Long Illness
Surveyed Highways and Railroads
Death claimed Cassius C. VanArsdol, 88, a civil engineer whose name has been linked with projects of magnitude, among them, being the Blue Mountain Highway, Lewiston Spiral Highway, North & South Highway system of Idaho, and numerous routes for railroads in the United States and Canada, died yesterday morning at 9 at his home, Thirteenth and Libby streets, following a lingering illness of several weeks. He has been in failing health for the last five years.
He filed the first water right for Clarkston property.
He and Mrs. VanArsdol were the parents of the first white child, Maurice, born in Clarkston, Dec. 18, 1896, and he is one of three to be the first to receive an engineering degree from the University of Iowa, in 1876.
Modest and perenially shrinking publicity for his notable feats, Mr. VanArsdol was always looked upon with respect by all who knew him. Legislators, financiers, governors, and other dignitaries have driven many miles to pay tribute to him.
FATHER OF HIGHWAY
Called the "father of the Blue Mountain highway," a banquet attended by the governor of Idaho and representatives of the governors of Washington and Oregon and a score of notables was served in his honor May 15, 1937, here, attended by more than 400.
Of the original incorporates of the Lewiston Water & Power Co., Van Arsdale, who engineered the plan to take water from Asotin Creek to the Clarkston Valley, was the last survivor. He tested the flow of Asotin Creek and visualized the development of Clarkston through irrigation from Asotin Creek.
Born Aug. 19, 1852, in Muncie, Ind., the son of Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Van Arsdol, he was two years old when the family moved to Clarinda, Iowa.
He graduated from the University of Iowa in 1876 and started his civil engineering career that brought fame and the development of this district.
TRAVELED THROUGHOUT THE WEST
He first took a job under E.A. Clark and his abilities soon became apparent. His duties took him to nearly every state in the West, surveying proposed routes for the Union Pacific railroad. He was one of the party to survey railroad routes to Denver, Cheyenne, and various parts of the Northwest.
President C. H. Hays of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad of Canada paid a glowing tribute to the work of Mr. Van Arsdol in the edition of World's Work of April 1910. He said, in part, as follows:
"To find the route through the mountains I secured the assistance of the foremost railway pathfinder on the American continent -- C.C. VanArsdol. For months at a time, not a word was heard of his whereabouts or welfare of the party which had gone into the heart of the great mountain range. At last, came the brief message"
" Can get through range via Yellowstone at 3,7000 feet with 4 - 10 grade one summit."
NOTABLE FEAT
"That was all. Crossing the mountain at a grade only equivalent to 1 percent, or 21 feet to the miles, was worth three years of waiting. The distinction of this remarkable engineering achievement will never leave the surveying engineer who discovered the Yellowhead Route."
Mr. VanArsdol's duties took him to Yuba City, Calif., and there he was married on April 29, 1886.
A year later he surveyed the Blue Mountain highway south of the Grand Ronde, a road which is assured completion within the next two years.
Mr. Van Arsdol served as president of the original Blue Mountain Tri-State Highway Association organized in 1917, of which William Huyette, Clarkston, was the secretary.
BENEFIT DISTRICT
Mr. Van Arsdol revealed his genius in civil engineering, plotting the Lewiston spiral route, the North & south highway near the rugged Salmon River Country, and other projects during that period.
He moved to Lewiston in 1893 and, after checking the Asotin Creek flow, filed the first water right at Asotin that same year. After the project for bringing water to the Clarkston valley was developed in 1895, he and his family moved from Lewiston to Clarkston on Oct. 18, 1896, where they have since resided.
Survivors include the widow, Della, Thirteenth & Libby; three sons, Vern, employed with the Bell Telephone Co. at San Mateo, Calif.; Maurice, Engineer at Seattle, and Fred W., state game protector at Yakima; two sisters, Mrs. Sallie Burrell, Albany, Ore., and Mollie E. Woods, Clarinda, and a brother, George, Coin, Iowa.
Fred and Mrs. Fred Van Arsdol and family arrived last night and Mr. and Mrs. Maurice Van Arsdol are due to arrive today from Seattle; They reported that Vern Van Arsdol will not be able to come because of a heart ailment.
The body is at Merchants Chapel, where the funeral arrangement is pending.
Lewiston Tribune Wednesday, February 26, 1941 pg. 6
=====
Located Spiral Highway
Pathfinder Van Arsdol Laid Out Clarkston
He was lean and land - a man and a half tall but only a man wide.
He came into the Valley in the 1880s -- possibly on the Uniontown stage -- and he left it in 1941 - almost surely in a heavenly carriage.
In between, he made an indelible mark on the landscape of North Central Idaho.
Officially he was Cassius C. Van Arsdol, but people knew him as just C. C. He is mostly remembered for doing the location work for the Lewiston Spiral Highway. More notable, perhaps, is the fact that he turned Jawbone Flat into the city of Clarkston. He trudged the high peaks along the backbone of the continent looking for passes. And he followed the valleys of western rivers in search of the right of way.
He located and built both rail lines and highways and he developed an irrigation system. And he built a small levee but it was not one of his proud achievements. Once he built a small levee but it was not one of his proud achievements. The waves beat it down and the water flooded downtown Lewiston. That's about all there was to Lewiston then.
Charles M. Hayes, the president of Canada's Grand Trunk Pacific, termed him "the foremost railway pathfinder in the American continent."
In 1889 when Virgil G. Bogue, the Union Pacific's chief engineer, was seeking to build a rail line through the Feather River Canyon in California, Van Arsdol took a look and said it could be done.
Bogue wasn't impressed at first. Four other engineers, he told Van Arsdol, had said it couldn't be done.
"I heard about your engineers up on the stage roads," Van Arsdol replied, "but damned if I ever saw their tracks down in the canyon."
Born near Muncie, Ind., on Aug. 19, 1851, Van Arsdol spent his youth on an Iowa farm. He graduated from the University of Iowa in 1876 and got his first railroad job two years later as what he described as "black flag" on a St. Louis, Kansas City & Northern survey party.
He was a quiet man using words the way a miser would if they cost two bits apiece, but he was intelligent and ambitious. When he applied for a job with the Union Pacific at Omaha in 1881, he took along a set of blueprints he had made, hoping they would impress UP Chief Engineer, J. Blickensdurfer.
"What's this?" Blickensdurfer asked. He'd never seen blueprints before. Van Arsdol went to work s Blickendurfer's assistant.
He became head of UP's Colorado division in 1885 and began the exploration work that made him the nation's top expert on western canyons and mountain passes.
He married Della Barada in Yuba City, Calif., on April 29, 1886. In the winter of 1889-1887, he was called upon to complete the construction of 95 miles of railroad track from Cheyenne to Chugwater, Wyo., after other engineers had bogged down.
He went without sleep as the crews pushed the tracks ahead through snowdrifts, blizzards, and cold, meeting the completion deadline and saving UP the $400,000 in bonds voted by the people of Cheyenne.
Van Arsdol moved on west then, into the country that was to become his home. He did surveys for the UP in the canyons of the Snake and Salmon rivers, and he switched sides during the Battle of the Clearwater. That's when UP and Northern Pacific were fighting-- literally, for rival construction crews sometimes would engage in a free-for-all -- for control of the Clearwater country.
There later was a shotgun marriage between UP and NP, and their offspring is named Camas Prairie Railroad.
Van Arsdol changed over to NP and charge of most of the NP track construction in the Clearwater region from 1889 through 1903. One of those lines came down from the Palouse to Lewiston.
Van Arsdol lived first at Pullman but he moved to Lewiston in 1893. NP was in receivership from 1892 to 1897, and he was at loose ends, taking odd jobs to keep busy. One of them was a two-week survey of Asotin county for the Oregon-Washington Irrigating Co.
In the process he got an idea: He'd tap Asotin Creek to bring water to the dry soil of Jawbone Flat and sell land to farmers. He didn't want the landlords to think it was a railroad project and raise their prices, so he invited others into the deal. They filed for water rights in 1893 and then bogged down on financing.
Earlier Van Arsdol had provided information on UP lines to the company president, Charles Francis Adams. Adams now had left the railroad and was speculating in western land, including some at Lewiston. Van Arsdol sold him on the Jawbone Flat plan and he paid $50,00 for 3,000 acres of land. Adams also got the Wheeler-Berker Syndicate of Boston to invest $200,000.
The result was the Lewiston Water and Power Co., incorporated at Asotin in December of 1895. The Boston Syndicate sent out E. H. Libby to be president of the company. Van Arsdol was a director, secretary, and engineer. A ditch was dug from Asotin Creek, and water churned into Jawbone Flat on July 18, 1896. Van Arsdol laid out the streets of the town that was destined to become Clarkston. One street is named Libby. Another is Van Arsdol. And it's Charles Francis Adams High School. But Clarkston never had a railroad.
For a short time during that period, Van Arsdol was involved with more water than he wanted. It was 1894 and the Snake and Clearwater rivers were rising at Lewiston. The mayor asked Van Arsdol to take charge of the construction of a levee. He did, building it out of materials at hand -- driftwood and bags of sand.
The rivers rose and the townspeople came by to look and call him Father Noah. Then the wind came up and the waved beat against the levee until it collapsed and the water flooded the city.
Van Arsdol's next project at Lewiston was more successful, supervision of the first building at Lewiston Normal School, now Lewis-Clark State College.
The Van Arsdols moved into a shack on a 15-acre sagebrush flat at what is now Clarkston's 15th and Chestnut Sts. on Oct. 17, 1896. There was one other shack on that side of the river then, the office of the LW&P, Co. A horse herder lived in a tent near the Snake River.
At their new home, Van Arsdol, the survey specialist and railroad builder, wired together a log corral for his wife's chickens. Coyotes came in the night and killed all of them. Van Arsdol had no better luck with his irrigation and landscape scheme.
He went back to NP when it came out of receivership in1897, selling his stock in the development company for $4,000.
From 1903 to 1914 Van Arsdol was division engineer on the Grand Trunk Pacific's project from Edmonton, Alta., to Prince Rupert, B.C. on the Pacific Ocean. The search for the best route took him three years and paid off fabulously.
He notified Grand Trunk President Hayes that track could be built through the Canadian Rockies at Yellowstone Pass at the 3,700- foot level at a grade of one percent.
Because of his surveying and engineering feats, he was of interest to Canadian newsmen. The Toronto Globe described him as "very quiet, non-commital, easy-going" and said he had the "marks of the outdoor world upon him."
A writer for Success Magazine wrote that van Arsdol was "low-voiced, unassuming, long and lean with a wide-brimmed black hat and bronzed, quizzical, seamed face under it." It also said he had "a bold, roving mind" and had "technical digested and assimilated."
He came to Clarkston in 1914, after the Yellowstone Pass triumph, and worked as a civil engineer. In that capacity, he did the location work for the Lewiston Spiral Highway as well as the Ehitebird, Winchester, Alpowa, and Rattlesnake grades and some others less notable. He was a prime mover on the Clarkston to Enterprise Highway and was the first president of the Blue Mountain Tri-State Highway Assn.
He died at his Clarkston home on Feb. 26, 1941, at the age of 89. In his obituary the Tribune paid a final tribute:
"After retirement, he sat in his Morris chair, smoking, napping, telling of and living again the days on an Iowa farm, the Cheyenne job, the days in Canada."
"Death came on Tuesday to an old man. The brief, bright moment of C. C. Van Arsdol was ended."
By Johnnie Johnson
Lewiston Tribune Thursday, October 27, 1977 pg. 30
===
1861 arrived in Lewiston - Clarkston - engineered diversion dam along Asotin Creek in (Headgate Dam -1906) constructed a irrigation canal to channel water from Asotin Creek along an 18 mile "Big Ditch" and 24-foot long tunnel through Swallows.
Left by jds on 29 Aug 2022
C. C. VanArsdol 88, Engineer, Taken By Death
Noted Clarkston Pioneer Succumbs at Home After Long Illness
Surveyed Highways and Railroads
Death claimed Cassius C. VanArsdol, 88, a civil engineer whose name has been linked with projects of magnitude, among them, being the Blue Mountain Highway, Lewiston Spiral Highway, North & South Highway system of Idaho, and numerous routes for railroads in the United States and Canada, died yesterday morning at 9 at his home, Thirteenth and Libby streets, following a lingering illness of several weeks. He has been in failing health for the last five years.
He filed the first water right for Clarkston property.
He and Mrs. VanArsdol were the parents of the first white child, Maurice, born in Clarkston, Dec. 18, 1896, and he is one of three to be the first to receive an engineering degree from the University of Iowa, in 1876.
Modest and perenially shrinking publicity for his notable feats, Mr. VanArsdol was always looked upon with respect by all who knew him. Legislators, financiers, governors, and other dignitaries have driven many miles to pay tribute to him.
FATHER OF HIGHWAY
Called the "father of the Blue Mountain highway," a banquet attended by the governor of Idaho and representatives of the governors of Washington and Oregon and a score of notables was served in his honor May 15, 1937, here, attended by more than 400.
Of the original incorporates of the Lewiston Water & Power Co., Van Arsdale, who engineered the plan to take water from Asotin Creek to the Clarkston Valley, was the last survivor. He tested the flow of Asotin Creek and visualized the development of Clarkston through irrigation from Asotin Creek.
Born Aug. 19, 1852, in Muncie, Ind., the son of Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Van Arsdol, he was two years old when the family moved to Clarinda, Iowa.
He graduated from the University of Iowa in 1876 and started his civil engineering career that brought fame and the development of this district.
TRAVELED THROUGHOUT THE WEST
He first took a job under E.A. Clark and his abilities soon became apparent. His duties took him to nearly every state in the West, surveying proposed routes for the Union Pacific railroad. He was one of the party to survey railroad routes to Denver, Cheyenne, and various parts of the Northwest.
President C. H. Hays of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad of Canada paid a glowing tribute to the work of Mr. Van Arsdol in the edition of World's Work of April 1910. He said, in part, as follows:
"To find the route through the mountains I secured the assistance of the foremost railway pathfinder on the American continent -- C.C. VanArsdol. For months at a time, not a word was heard of his whereabouts or welfare of the party which had gone into the heart of the great mountain range. At last, came the brief message"
" Can get through range via Yellowstone at 3,7000 feet with 4 - 10 grade one summit."
NOTABLE FEAT
"That was all. Crossing the mountain at a grade only equivalent to 1 percent, or 21 feet to the miles, was worth three years of waiting. The distinction of this remarkable engineering achievement will never leave the surveying engineer who discovered the Yellowhead Route."
Mr. VanArsdol's duties took him to Yuba City, Calif., and there he was married on April 29, 1886.
A year later he surveyed the Blue Mountain highway south of the Grand Ronde, a road which is assured completion within the next two years.
Mr. Van Arsdol served as president of the original Blue Mountain Tri-State Highway Association organized in 1917, of which William Huyette, Clarkston, was the secretary.
BENEFIT DISTRICT
Mr. Van Arsdol revealed his genius in civil engineering, plotting the Lewiston spiral route, the North & south highway near the rugged Salmon River Country, and other projects during that period.
He moved to Lewiston in 1893 and, after checking the Asotin Creek flow, filed the first water right at Asotin that same year. After the project for bringing water to the Clarkston valley was developed in 1895, he and his family moved from Lewiston to Clarkston on Oct. 18, 1896, where they have since resided.
Survivors include the widow, Della, Thirteenth & Libby; three sons, Vern, employed with the Bell Telephone Co. at San Mateo, Calif.; Maurice, Engineer at Seattle, and Fred W., state game protector at Yakima; two sisters, Mrs. Sallie Burrell, Albany, Ore., and Mollie E. Woods, Clarinda, and a brother, George, Coin, Iowa.
Fred and Mrs. Fred Van Arsdol and family arrived last night and Mr. and Mrs. Maurice Van Arsdol are due to arrive today from Seattle; They reported that Vern Van Arsdol will not be able to come because of a heart ailment.
The body is at Merchants Chapel, where the funeral arrangement is pending.
Lewiston Tribune Wednesday, February 26, 1941 pg. 6
=====
Located Spiral Highway
Pathfinder Van Arsdol Laid Out Clarkston
He was lean and land - a man and a half tall but only a man wide.
He came into the Valley in the 1880s -- possibly on the Uniontown stage -- and he left it in 1941 - almost surely in a heavenly carriage.
In between, he made an indelible mark on the landscape of North Central Idaho.
Officially he was Cassius C. Van Arsdol, but people knew him as just C. C. He is mostly remembered for doing the location work for the Lewiston Spiral Highway. More notable, perhaps, is the fact that he turned Jawbone Flat into the city of Clarkston. He trudged the high peaks along the backbone of the continent looking for passes. And he followed the valleys of western rivers in search of the right of way.
He located and built both rail lines and highways and he developed an irrigation system. And he built a small levee but it was not one of his proud achievements. Once he built a small levee but it was not one of his proud achievements. The waves beat it down and the water flooded downtown Lewiston. That's about all there was to Lewiston then.
Charles M. Hayes, the president of Canada's Grand Trunk Pacific, termed him "the foremost railway pathfinder in the American continent."
In 1889 when Virgil G. Bogue, the Union Pacific's chief engineer, was seeking to build a rail line through the Feather River Canyon in California, Van Arsdol took a look and said it could be done.
Bogue wasn't impressed at first. Four other engineers, he told Van Arsdol, had said it couldn't be done.
"I heard about your engineers up on the stage roads," Van Arsdol replied, "but damned if I ever saw their tracks down in the canyon."
Born near Muncie, Ind., on Aug. 19, 1851, Van Arsdol spent his youth on an Iowa farm. He graduated from the University of Iowa in 1876 and got his first railroad job two years later as what he described as "black flag" on a St. Louis, Kansas City & Northern survey party.
He was a quiet man using words the way a miser would if they cost two bits apiece, but he was intelligent and ambitious. When he applied for a job with the Union Pacific at Omaha in 1881, he took along a set of blueprints he had made, hoping they would impress UP Chief Engineer, J. Blickensdurfer.
"What's this?" Blickensdurfer asked. He'd never seen blueprints before. Van Arsdol went to work s Blickendurfer's assistant.
He became head of UP's Colorado division in 1885 and began the exploration work that made him the nation's top expert on western canyons and mountain passes.
He married Della Barada in Yuba City, Calif., on April 29, 1886. In the winter of 1889-1887, he was called upon to complete the construction of 95 miles of railroad track from Cheyenne to Chugwater, Wyo., after other engineers had bogged down.
He went without sleep as the crews pushed the tracks ahead through snowdrifts, blizzards, and cold, meeting the completion deadline and saving UP the $400,000 in bonds voted by the people of Cheyenne.
Van Arsdol moved on west then, into the country that was to become his home. He did surveys for the UP in the canyons of the Snake and Salmon rivers, and he switched sides during the Battle of the Clearwater. That's when UP and Northern Pacific were fighting-- literally, for rival construction crews sometimes would engage in a free-for-all -- for control of the Clearwater country.
There later was a shotgun marriage between UP and NP, and their offspring is named Camas Prairie Railroad.
Van Arsdol changed over to NP and charge of most of the NP track construction in the Clearwater region from 1889 through 1903. One of those lines came down from the Palouse to Lewiston.
Van Arsdol lived first at Pullman but he moved to Lewiston in 1893. NP was in receivership from 1892 to 1897, and he was at loose ends, taking odd jobs to keep busy. One of them was a two-week survey of Asotin county for the Oregon-Washington Irrigating Co.
In the process he got an idea: He'd tap Asotin Creek to bring water to the dry soil of Jawbone Flat and sell land to farmers. He didn't want the landlords to think it was a railroad project and raise their prices, so he invited others into the deal. They filed for water rights in 1893 and then bogged down on financing.
Earlier Van Arsdol had provided information on UP lines to the company president, Charles Francis Adams. Adams now had left the railroad and was speculating in western land, including some at Lewiston. Van Arsdol sold him on the Jawbone Flat plan and he paid $50,00 for 3,000 acres of land. Adams also got the Wheeler-Berker Syndicate of Boston to invest $200,000.
The result was the Lewiston Water and Power Co., incorporated at Asotin in December of 1895. The Boston Syndicate sent out E. H. Libby to be president of the company. Van Arsdol was a director, secretary, and engineer. A ditch was dug from Asotin Creek, and water churned into Jawbone Flat on July 18, 1896. Van Arsdol laid out the streets of the town that was destined to become Clarkston. One street is named Libby. Another is Van Arsdol. And it's Charles Francis Adams High School. But Clarkston never had a railroad.
For a short time during that period, Van Arsdol was involved with more water than he wanted. It was 1894 and the Snake and Clearwater rivers were rising at Lewiston. The mayor asked Van Arsdol to take charge of the construction of a levee. He did, building it out of materials at hand -- driftwood and bags of sand.
The rivers rose and the townspeople came by to look and call him Father Noah. Then the wind came up and the waved beat against the levee until it collapsed and the water flooded the city.
Van Arsdol's next project at Lewiston was more successful, supervision of the first building at Lewiston Normal School, now Lewis-Clark State College.
The Van Arsdols moved into a shack on a 15-acre sagebrush flat at what is now Clarkston's 15th and Chestnut Sts. on Oct. 17, 1896. There was one other shack on that side of the river then, the office of the LW&P, Co. A horse herder lived in a tent near the Snake River.
At their new home, Van Arsdol, the survey specialist and railroad builder, wired together a log corral for his wife's chickens. Coyotes came in the night and killed all of them. Van Arsdol had no better luck with his irrigation and landscape scheme.
He went back to NP when it came out of receivership in1897, selling his stock in the development company for $4,000.
From 1903 to 1914 Van Arsdol was division engineer on the Grand Trunk Pacific's project from Edmonton, Alta., to Prince Rupert, B.C. on the Pacific Ocean. The search for the best route took him three years and paid off fabulously.
He notified Grand Trunk President Hayes that track could be built through the Canadian Rockies at Yellowstone Pass at the 3,700- foot level at a grade of one percent.
Because of his surveying and engineering feats, he was of interest to Canadian newsmen. The Toronto Globe described him as "very quiet, non-commital, easy-going" and said he had the "marks of the outdoor world upon him."
A writer for Success Magazine wrote that van Arsdol was "low-voiced, unassuming, long and lean with a wide-brimmed black hat and bronzed, quizzical, seamed face under it." It also said he had "a bold, roving mind" and had "technical digested and assimilated."
He came to Clarkston in 1914, after the Yellowstone Pass triumph, and worked as a civil engineer. In that capacity, he did the location work for the Lewiston Spiral Highway as well as the Ehitebird, Winchester, Alpowa, and Rattlesnake grades and some others less notable. He was a prime mover on the Clarkston to Enterprise Highway and was the first president of the Blue Mountain Tri-State Highway Assn.
He died at his Clarkston home on Feb. 26, 1941, at the age of 89. In his obituary the Tribune paid a final tribute:
"After retirement, he sat in his Morris chair, smoking, napping, telling of and living again the days on an Iowa farm, the Cheyenne job, the days in Canada."
"Death came on Tuesday to an old man. The brief, bright moment of C. C. Van Arsdol was ended."
By Johnnie Johnson
Lewiston Tribune Thursday, October 27, 1977 pg. 30
===
1861 arrived in Lewiston - Clarkston - engineered diversion dam along Asotin Creek in (Headgate Dam -1906) constructed a irrigation canal to channel water from Asotin Creek along an 18 mile "Big Ditch" and 24-foot long tunnel through Swallows.
Left by jds on 29 Aug 2022
Noted Clarkston Pioneer Succumbs at Home After Long Illness
Surveyed Highways and Railroads
Death claimed Cassius C. VanArsdol, 88, a civil engineer whose name has been linked with projects of magnitude, among them, being the Blue Mountain Highway, Lewiston Spiral Highway, North & South Highway system of Idaho, and numerous routes for railroads in the United States and Canada, died yesterday morning at 9 at his home, Thirteenth and Libby streets, following a lingering illness of several weeks. He has been in failing health for the last five years.
He filed the first water right for Clarkston property.
He and Mrs. VanArsdol were the parents of the first white child, Maurice, born in Clarkston, Dec. 18, 1896, and he is one of three to be the first to receive an engineering degree from the University of Iowa, in 1876.
Modest and perenially shrinking publicity for his notable feats, Mr. VanArsdol was always looked upon with respect by all who knew him. Legislators, financiers, governors, and other dignitaries have driven many miles to pay tribute to him.
FATHER OF HIGHWAY
Called the "father of the Blue Mountain highway," a banquet attended by the governor of Idaho and representatives of the governors of Washington and Oregon and a score of notables was served in his honor May 15, 1937, here, attended by more than 400.
Of the original incorporates of the Lewiston Water & Power Co., Van Arsdale, who engineered the plan to take water from Asotin Creek to the Clarkston Valley, was the last survivor. He tested the flow of Asotin Creek and visualized the development of Clarkston through irrigation from Asotin Creek.
Born Aug. 19, 1852, in Muncie, Ind., the son of Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Van Arsdol, he was two years old when the family moved to Clarinda, Iowa.
He graduated from the University of Iowa in 1876 and started his civil engineering career that brought fame and the development of this district.
TRAVELED THROUGHOUT THE WEST
He first took a job under E.A. Clark and his abilities soon became apparent. His duties took him to nearly every state in the West, surveying proposed routes for the Union Pacific railroad. He was one of the party to survey railroad routes to Denver, Cheyenne, and various parts of the Northwest.
President C. H. Hays of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad of Canada paid a glowing tribute to the work of Mr. Van Arsdol in the edition of World's Work of April 1910. He said, in part, as follows:
"To find the route through the mountains I secured the assistance of the foremost railway pathfinder on the American continent -- C.C. VanArsdol. For months at a time, not a word was heard of his whereabouts or welfare of the party which had gone into the heart of the great mountain range. At last, came the brief message"
" Can get through range via Yellowstone at 3,7000 feet with 4 - 10 grade one summit."
NOTABLE FEAT
"That was all. Crossing the mountain at a grade only equivalent to 1 percent, or 21 feet to the miles, was worth three years of waiting. The distinction of this remarkable engineering achievement will never leave the surveying engineer who discovered the Yellowhead Route."
Mr. VanArsdol's duties took him to Yuba City, Calif., and there he was married on April 29, 1886.
A year later he surveyed the Blue Mountain highway south of the Grand Ronde, a road which is assured completion within the next two years.
Mr. Van Arsdol served as president of the original Blue Mountain Tri-State Highway Association organized in 1917, of which William Huyette, Clarkston, was the secretary.
BENEFIT DISTRICT
Mr. Van Arsdol revealed his genius in civil engineering, plotting the Lewiston spiral route, the North & south highway near the rugged Salmon River Country, and other projects during that period.
He moved to Lewiston in 1893 and, after checking the Asotin Creek flow, filed the first water right at Asotin that same year. After the project for bringing water to the Clarkston valley was developed in 1895, he and his family moved from Lewiston to Clarkston on Oct. 18, 1896, where they have since resided.
Survivors include the widow, Della, Thirteenth & Libby; three sons, Vern, employed with the Bell Telephone Co. at San Mateo, Calif.; Maurice, Engineer at Seattle, and Fred W., state game protector at Yakima; two sisters, Mrs. Sallie Burrell, Albany, Ore., and Mollie E. Woods, Clarinda, and a brother, George, Coin, Iowa.
Fred and Mrs. Fred Van Arsdol and family arrived last night and Mr. and Mrs. Maurice Van Arsdol are due to arrive today from Seattle; They reported that Vern Van Arsdol will not be able to come because of a heart ailment.
The body is at Merchants Chapel, where the funeral arrangement is pending.
Lewiston Tribune Wednesday, February 26, 1941 pg. 6
=====
Located Spiral Highway
Pathfinder Van Arsdol Laid Out Clarkston
He was lean and land - a man and a half tall but only a man wide.
He came into the Valley in the 1880s -- possibly on the Uniontown stage -- and he left it in 1941 - almost surely in a heavenly carriage.
In between, he made an indelible mark on the landscape of North Central Idaho.
Officially he was Cassius C. Van Arsdol, but people knew him as just C. C. He is mostly remembered for doing the location work for the Lewiston Spiral Highway. More notable, perhaps, is the fact that he turned Jawbone Flat into the city of Clarkston. He trudged the high peaks along the backbone of the continent looking for passes. And he followed the valleys of western rivers in search of the right of way.
He located and built both rail lines and highways and he developed an irrigation system. And he built a small levee but it was not one of his proud achievements. Once he built a small levee but it was not one of his proud achievements. The waves beat it down and the water flooded downtown Lewiston. That's about all there was to Lewiston then.
Charles M. Hayes, the president of Canada's Grand Trunk Pacific, termed him "the foremost railway pathfinder in the American continent."
In 1889 when Virgil G. Bogue, the Union Pacific's chief engineer, was seeking to build a rail line through the Feather River Canyon in California, Van Arsdol took a look and said it could be done.
Bogue wasn't impressed at first. Four other engineers, he told Van Arsdol, had said it couldn't be done.
"I heard about your engineers up on the stage roads," Van Arsdol replied, "but damned if I ever saw their tracks down in the canyon."
Born near Muncie, Ind., on Aug. 19, 1851, Van Arsdol spent his youth on an Iowa farm. He graduated from the University of Iowa in 1876 and got his first railroad job two years later as what he described as "black flag" on a St. Louis, Kansas City & Northern survey party.
He was a quiet man using words the way a miser would if they cost two bits apiece, but he was intelligent and ambitious. When he applied for a job with the Union Pacific at Omaha in 1881, he took along a set of blueprints he had made, hoping they would impress UP Chief Engineer, J. Blickensdurfer.
"What's this?" Blickensdurfer asked. He'd never seen blueprints before. Van Arsdol went to work s Blickendurfer's assistant.
He became head of UP's Colorado division in 1885 and began the exploration work that made him the nation's top expert on western canyons and mountain passes.
He married Della Barada in Yuba City, Calif., on April 29, 1886. In the winter of 1889-1887, he was called upon to complete the construction of 95 miles of railroad track from Cheyenne to Chugwater, Wyo., after other engineers had bogged down.
He went without sleep as the crews pushed the tracks ahead through snowdrifts, blizzards, and cold, meeting the completion deadline and saving UP the $400,000 in bonds voted by the people of Cheyenne.
Van Arsdol moved on west then, into the country that was to become his home. He did surveys for the UP in the canyons of the Snake and Salmon rivers, and he switched sides during the Battle of the Clearwater. That's when UP and Northern Pacific were fighting-- literally, for rival construction crews sometimes would engage in a free-for-all -- for control of the Clearwater country.
There later was a shotgun marriage between UP and NP, and their offspring is named Camas Prairie Railroad.
Van Arsdol changed over to NP and charge of most of the NP track construction in the Clearwater region from 1889 through 1903. One of those lines came down from the Palouse to Lewiston.
Van Arsdol lived first at Pullman but he moved to Lewiston in 1893. NP was in receivership from 1892 to 1897, and he was at loose ends, taking odd jobs to keep busy. One of them was a two-week survey of Asotin county for the Oregon-Washington Irrigating Co.
In the process he got an idea: He'd tap Asotin Creek to bring water to the dry soil of Jawbone Flat and sell land to farmers. He didn't want the landlords to think it was a railroad project and raise their prices, so he invited others into the deal. They filed for water rights in 1893 and then bogged down on financing.
Earlier Van Arsdol had provided information on UP lines to the company president, Charles Francis Adams. Adams now had left the railroad and was speculating in western land, including some at Lewiston. Van Arsdol sold him on the Jawbone Flat plan and he paid $50,00 for 3,000 acres of land. Adams also got the Wheeler-Berker Syndicate of Boston to invest $200,000.
The result was the Lewiston Water and Power Co., incorporated at Asotin in December of 1895. The Boston Syndicate sent out E. H. Libby to be president of the company. Van Arsdol was a director, secretary, and engineer. A ditch was dug from Asotin Creek, and water churned into Jawbone Flat on July 18, 1896. Van Arsdol laid out the streets of the town that was destined to become Clarkston. One street is named Libby. Another is Van Arsdol. And it's Charles Francis Adams High School. But Clarkston never had a railroad.
For a short time during that period, Van Arsdol was involved with more water than he wanted. It was 1894 and the Snake and Clearwater rivers were rising at Lewiston. The mayor asked Van Arsdol to take charge of the construction of a levee. He did, building it out of materials at hand -- driftwood and bags of sand.
The rivers rose and the townspeople came by to look and call him Father Noah. Then the wind came up and the waved beat against the levee until it collapsed and the water flooded the city.
Van Arsdol's next project at Lewiston was more successful, supervision of the first building at Lewiston Normal School, now Lewis-Clark State College.
The Van Arsdols moved into a shack on a 15-acre sagebrush flat at what is now Clarkston's 15th and Chestnut Sts. on Oct. 17, 1896. There was one other shack on that side of the river then, the office of the LW&P, Co. A horse herder lived in a tent near the Snake River.
At their new home, Van Arsdol, the survey specialist and railroad builder, wired together a log corral for his wife's chickens. Coyotes came in the night and killed all of them. Van Arsdol had no better luck with his irrigation and landscape scheme.
He went back to NP when it came out of receivership in1897, selling his stock in the development company for $4,000.
From 1903 to 1914 Van Arsdol was division engineer on the Grand Trunk Pacific's project from Edmonton, Alta., to Prince Rupert, B.C. on the Pacific Ocean. The search for the best route took him three years and paid off fabulously.
He notified Grand Trunk President Hayes that track could be built through the Canadian Rockies at Yellowstone Pass at the 3,700- foot level at a grade of one percent.
Because of his surveying and engineering feats, he was of interest to Canadian newsmen. The Toronto Globe described him as "very quiet, non-commital, easy-going" and said he had the "marks of the outdoor world upon him."
A writer for Success Magazine wrote that van Arsdol was "low-voiced, unassuming, long and lean with a wide-brimmed black hat and bronzed, quizzical, seamed face under it." It also said he had "a bold, roving mind" and had "technical digested and assimilated."
He came to Clarkston in 1914, after the Yellowstone Pass triumph, and worked as a civil engineer. In that capacity, he did the location work for the Lewiston Spiral Highway as well as the Ehitebird, Winchester, Alpowa, and Rattlesnake grades and some others less notable. He was a prime mover on the Clarkston to Enterprise Highway and was the first president of the Blue Mountain Tri-State Highway Assn.
He died at his Clarkston home on Feb. 26, 1941, at the age of 89. In his obituary the Tribune paid a final tribute:
"After retirement, he sat in his Morris chair, smoking, napping, telling of and living again the days on an Iowa farm, the Cheyenne job, the days in Canada."
"Death came on Tuesday to an old man. The brief, bright moment of C. C. Van Arsdol was ended."
By Johnnie Johnson
Lewiston Tribune Thursday, October 27, 1977 pg. 30
===
1861 arrived in Lewiston - Clarkston - engineered diversion dam along Asotin Creek in (Headgate Dam -1906) constructed a irrigation canal to channel water from Asotin Creek along an 18 mile "Big Ditch" and 24-foot long tunnel through Swallows.
Left by jds on 29 Aug 2022
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