Skagit River Journal

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Noel V. Bourasaw, editor 810 Central Ave., Sedro-Woolley, Washington, 98284 Home of the Tarheel Stomp Mortimer Cook slept here & named the town Bug
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Mortimer Cook, founder of Bug and Sedro
key figure all over America

Mortimer Cook, mayor of Santa Barbara, 1875

Journal stories about Mortimer Cook and family To think that all this started with some annoying mosquitoes. Mortimer Cook was the founder of a town on the north shore of the Skagit River that he first named Bug in June 1884 and then renamed Sedro when he obtained a post office appointment on Dec. 7, 1885. He was the inspiration for this history project in 1992 and his story will be the most extensively researched here on the website. Here are the stories now featured on this page about Cook and his family:

The editor dreams of what happened the first day that Mortimer Cook set foot on the acreage on the north shore of the Skagit in 1884 at the site that became Sedro, updated in 2011 from the draft of his book, Humbug, which will be a biography of Mortimer Cook.
Brief introduction to what actually happened when Mortimer Cook and his family came to the Skagit.
Many more links to Cook, Bug and Sedro below at the end of the story.

The editor dreams of what might have happened
when Mortimer Cook arrived at future Sedro in June 1884
1. Arrival June is a dangerous time to visit the Skagit Valley near Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest. Dangerous because the table that is set for you is so compelling. The misty rain that discourages many travelers in other months only occasionally falls then and it seems to open an artist's palate of greenery and flowers and trees that cast a bit of a spell on the unprepared. The artist Julian E. Itter enticed many to come see for themselves when he captured nature's dance in oils on canvas at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
Nearly a decade earlier, Mortimer Cook hopped out of an Indian's handmade cedar canoe and stood knee deep in Skagit River water as he helped his hired Indian guides glide the craft up over tule weeds. After they secured the canoe on the gentle slope of a sandbank, Mortimer stood in the sand, looking north. His Indian guides occupied themselves setting up a camp, but Mortimer surveyed the forest around him and began summing up..
The year was 1884, but the towering forest north of the river was timeless. He had left Santa Barbara, California with a decent nest egg — part from the sale of his remaining property there and part of it borrowed, to invest in this forest land, and the lenders wanted him to show a profit in a reasonable period of time. As he leaned back and looked way up overhead, he wondered if this forest of cedar, hemlock, cottonwood and fir, which spread like an impregnable wall in front of him, was the answer. His ears slowly attuned to the sounds of the forest. Eagles swooped down to spear salmon just yards away where part of the river flowed into a slough, or alternate channel. Rodents scurried through the brambles that wound up most of the cedars that jutted over the riverbank.
The year was 1884, but the towering forest north of the river was timeless. He had left Santa Barbara, California with a decent nest egg — part from the sale of his remaining property there and part of it borrowed, to invest in this forest land, and the lenders wanted him to show a profit in a reasonable period of time. As he leaned back and looked way up overhead, he wondered if this forest of cedars, hemlocks and firs, which spread like an impregnable wall in front of him, was the answer. His ears slowly attuned to the sounds of the forest. Eagles swooped down to spear salmon just yards away where part of the river flowed into a slough, or alternate channel. Rodents scurried through the brambles that wound up most of the cedars that jutted over the riverbank..
When he finally rose from the sand, he strode with purpose up the slope into the canopy of trees. It was mid-afternoon and he had been warned to stay out of the dense woods after dark. Cook heard that a settler named Carlton Stevens had nearly gone mad recently when he got lost in the swamps a mile away. He counted paces well into the stand of trees and stopped at a hundred. He decided to hike up to the farm of David Batey, and ask the original 1878 settler to build a house for his family where he now stood, and a general store at the fork where the slough named for the pioneer angled off from the river.
Twenty years before, Mortimer founded a town on another river, Cook's Ferry on the Thompson River in British Columbia. What would he name his town here on the Skagit? Over the next few months, as they cleared the swamp and swatted at the insects buzzing everywhere, he was inclined more and more to call it Bug, in honor of the mosquitoes whose stings were even more severe than those of their brethren down in California. Or maybe he recalled the adjective applied to California gold rush country:.
"It was humbug."

2. The neighbors Cook's Indian guides led him along a trail traveled by their ancestors "since time began," they told him. He had learned a trading language Indians used to communicate with the settlers and as they walked over the soggy path, he asked what they mostly ate. They smiled and told him of the months when their Skagit salmon filled the shallower parts of the river "so deep you can walk over them." They speared the fish and dried them on large wooden racks. They built longhouses and sweat houses where they celebrated their bounty and then followed the trails like this one to trading centers in and over the hills that formed a bowl around the narrow river valley.
As they led him northwest on a diagonal along the slough bed, he noticed a high gravelly bench on their that ranged in height from about 20 to 50 feet. That hinted at a possible earlier channel of the river that may have flowed deeper and wider across the valley. A danger flag popped up in his mind: if I build my store down at the river, could it flood not only the townsite but even over that bench? So he asked them and this time the medium did not work. No, they answered, because it had not flooded over the bench itself, just a couple feet beneath, which meant that his store would be under at least 15 feet of water. That mixed signal did not haunt him immediately, but it did visit a decade later and in a humorous, as well as expensive, way.
The trail they followed seemed to dissect what appeared to be a large swampland. He recalled seeing similar landforms about 40 miles farther north along the Nooksack River, back in 1858 when he ran pack teams with another Northwest pioneer, Henry Roeder, up to the placer-gold fields along another river, the Fraser, in British Columbia, even farther north. He had not ventured down to the Skagit then, partly because he was so occupied with packing supplies to the Argonauts and partly because log jams a dozen miles downstream choked off travel on the Skagit.
The party noticed a large log cabin fairly close to the river shore but then walked for at least two miles without seeing another sign of civilization. High alongside the ridge on the bench they could see puffs of smoke from behind a wall of berries that were purple and bulging with juice. The Indians told him that the berries were another of their food staples and trading goods.
One of Batey's sons greeted them and showed them an almost hidden path up the bunch through the clusters of berry vines. At that point the Indians departed back to the river but not before they extended their palms in anticipation of another "sitcum buck," their charge for the completed passage. Such was a term that was born from the Chinook Jargon trading language that was cobbled together a century before by Indians, ship captains and traders northwest on Vancouver Island, named for the English captain who first informed the rest of the world about this largely unexplored corner.
The boy was Batey's stepson and he was happy to hear of the outside world from another Caucasian visitor. As it turned out, Batey was another immigrant from across the Atlantic who had tramped across this continent in the flow of manifest destiny to the Pacific Ocean. Like Cook himself, everyone seemed to be moving West in that decade, especially those seeking a new land where they were not restricted by their class or trapped in old social hierarchies and pecking orders. Batey was already known in these parts for his carpentry skills as well as his ability to adapt quickly to any new environment.
As they chatted on wooden benches outside his log cabin, Batey told Cook about how he and his fellow immigrant, Joseph Hart, almost succumbed to the elements the first winter they spent here. In the winter six years earlier they originally built a lean-to from brambles and twigs but the prevalent howling wind from the northeast blew their shelter down within days and Batey's carpenter skills saved the day. That was when they were graced by the friendship of the Indians, who showed little fear or hesitation in accepting the newcomers and then shared with them the secrets of the fish and the berries and where they could find wild game to hunt up in the hills.
One thing had not changed in the 26 years since Cook had traveled here, as Batey noted: settler women were few and far between. Although his three fellow English immigrants from 1878 were still single, Batey found a wife of the same complexion almost by accident while trading for supplies in San Francisco. Not only was Georgianna Ferron of the same race but she brought a ready-made family of two young boys and a medical degree from Iowa. Her first husband was shanghaied in the Barbary Coast section of the San Francisco wharfs and she accepted Batey's invitation to move her family up to live with him in the wilderness of the Northwest. Doctors, especially the legit ones, were even more scarce than Caucasian women in these climes and she made quite an impression on the settler and merchant population here. That day, she had been called away "upriver" to another small village, Birdsview, where a logger had spliced open his leg with an axe.
Batey and Cook were connected via another transplant from the Great Lakes region of the Mid-West. Along with Roeder, who also hailed from Ohio, Cook's home state, a fellow named Capt. John Warner traveled west from the Great Lakes to become a '49er in the California gold fields in the early 1850s when Cook owned a general store at the diggings of Rabbit Creek in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Warner joined Cook in British Columbia after the 1858 gold discovery and he married an Indian girl at the Thompson River, where Cook founded his first town. Cook returned to Ohio and married in 1864, after amassing his first small fortune, while Warner remained in the Northwest, moving south across the border to Whatcom County and then to the Samish River region, 20 miles northwest from Batey's locale.
Batey soon discerned that his visitor might just be the kind of man that people sought in these parts, the kind with bona fides. He was a merchant, had even been a banker, a town father and knew investors with capital who could help them attract industry to supplement the logging and farming that formed the basis of the northwestern Washington Territory economy. As they became friends over the next few days Batey took him on the rounds to visit the small nucleus of farmers and loggers who were carving out homes in the omnipresent forest.
The closest was another immigrant, this time from xx in northwestern Germany, Heinrich Holtkamp, who had another skill that settlers highly valued: he was a blacksmith who had staked a preemption homestead just two miles north of Batey and his talent was in great demand for the equipment, saws and plows of the farms and logging camps. Just west of Batey's farm was Jesse Beriah Ball, who was the first logger to settle her permanently. Ball built a small village around his camp at a section of the river that settlers soon called Ball's Riffle and then Sterling by the time that Cook arrived. Near a meander on the river a few miles to the east Batey introduced him to Charles J. Wicker, who arrived on the scene from Iowa just as few months earlier and was already preparing to welcome several other families who were planning to follow him from Chillicothe and Des Moines in that state.
Wicker lived at the section of the river that Indians called the Skiyou, named for their own unique cemetery. Instead of interring their dead underground, they suspended them on cedar poles in the crook-limbs of cedar trees. Two other settler families lived within shouting distance of Wicker, including the earliest settlers of the region, Emmett and Eliza Van Fleet, who moved here in May 1880 from their ancestral home of Fleetville, Pennsylvania. Eliza was the only settler wife hereabouts when David brought Dr. Georgianna home with him a few months later that year.
Batey's fellow English immigrants from 1878 also lived near Skiyou but they were not home that day. Joseph Hart, whose cabin Cook and the Indians passed near the river, had other interests down in King County near the growing town of Seattle. William Woods, the oldest of the settlers, raised cattle stock and was off trading. William Dunlop was in search of pigs, which would provide his income for the whole time he lived here.
The last Skiyou neighbor they visited was the captain of the sternwheeler steamboat, the Glide, that had carried Cook up the river when he arrived. "Steamboat Dan" Benson knew the river as well as anyone in the Northwest and he and his father and family carved out a small farm on land across a small creek from the Van Fleets. We surmise that it was Benson who probably cemented Cook's decision to settle at this point on the river by showing him the ins and outs of the mode of transportation on which the Northwest settler most depended in the 1880s. Although much of Northwest history revolves around railroads, the iron rails had not yet cut through the forest and would not start making their mark until 1889.
The steamboat was the latest technological advance here and the sternwheeler was at its head. The large paddle at the stern only descended into the river a foot or two, which meant that it could ascend to even the shallower regions, along with the tributary streams, in the summer months. Settlers remarked that sternwheelers could "float over the dew" on the way to pick up logs, hay for cattle raisers and produce from the farmers.
Another advantage was that the sternwheeler needed no elaborate wharf pier; a skilled captain could literally back the boat up to a sand bar or slope where any load was packed and waiting. And with them the captains brought tools from the metropolitan areas and supplies that supplemented the stock of the few stores at the few towns along the Skagit. As farmers cleared the trees to get at the rich topsoil, they chopped the wood and left it in large piles every few miles along the river because the hungry steamboat boilers needed fuel wood by the dozens of cords each trip.
Cook suddenly realized that the place where he had landed with the Indians was not only a natural fording place at the river, where a crude ferry could cross, but it was also a natural location for a small steamboat wharf when needed for larger loads, with his store there to serve the villagers. And the settlers were coming that year by the dozens, to many of the clearings in the forest along the shores of Puget Sound and the rivers that drained the North Cascades mountain range.
For at least the next five years, the only way that the new settlers could transport their belongings and goods to their new homes was by canoe or sternwheeler. The overland trails were obstructed by deadfalls of trees and the stands of trees were so dense in those beginning days that the canopy only admitted sunlight for a few hours per day, and that was if the sun was shining. Over a decade would pass after Cook's arrival until the first primitive trail was cut along the northern shore of the Skagit River and even then only the sturdiest of wagons could traverse it.
Two German brothers arrived at the Skagit at almost the same time as Cook did, but we learned to our surprise mdash; from their descendants, that they barely ever crossed Cook's path for the 15 years that they lived within two miles of each other. They took homesteads due north of Cook's location, and east of Holtkamp (later Americanized to Holtcamp), but when they went trading they followed another Indian trail that led southwest in an arc to the Sterling district. In all the brother's records the family never found any mention of the brothers trading at Cook's store.
After a few days Cook made his decision. He would establish his business here, a general store, but even more important for his and the area's future, he would build a mill to produce shingles for the homes that newcomers planned for their cabins and homes up and down the West Coast. As it turned out, one of John Warner's industrious sons, soon stepped up to help Cook find stands of trees that he could buy, or timberlands that he could purchase or lease, and the same young man rustled up the crews to perform the initial logging. The only major problem he had to overcome was how to ship his mill products most economically. The volume he needed to produce could not be transported by the relatively small sternwheelers. Although the nearest railroad was still nearly 75 miles away, he took that possibility into account when choosing the spot on the river for his store. He knew from experience in Topeka, Kansas, where he built a bridge six years earlier that any spot that was a natural ford, such as the location he first noticed, was also the prime spot for a railroad trestle. And he knew that if he built a destination, the rails would surely come. But for now, he would depend on the steamboat passengers and trade.
Mortimer was on his way to building his fourth fortune, and his last, as it turned out, and this one would tax his skills and his patience even more than the fortunes that had come and gone in his life in the four decades since he hitched his field mules to a fencepost near Mansfield, Ohio and left a message for his parents that he was heading off to enlist for the Mexican War.

Mortimer Cook's general store and post office in old Sedro, ca. 1888, Mortimer 5th from left. And his clerk, and future druggist, Albert E. Holland, 3rd from the right, in front of the doors. The photographer stood on Cook's wharf for sternwheelers. His home is upslope to the left, where the Rotary rock theater stands today at Riverfront Park. His daughter Nina is riding her horse.

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Mortimer Cook chose to start his town on the Skagit River in Washington Territory for the same reason that many other pioneers chose their havens. He wanted to get away from something. When Mortimer arrived by sternwheeler steamboat at Ball's Camp in Sterling (two miles west of here) sometime by 1884, he found a river shore retreat hidden away in towering trees, and he thought it was sublime. He left behind bankruptcy and a roller-coaster ride to the top and bottom in California.
If Mortimer had not settled on the north shore of the Skagit River in the early 1880s, Sedro-Woolley probably would not be here today. Whenever he first arrived, in 1883 or 1884, he impressed the original settlers, David Batey and Joe Hart, because he was the first genuine city father they had ever met. He founded Cook's Ferry on the Thompson River in British Columbia (BC) in 1861, and he was a town father at Santa Barbara, where he also served as mayor in the 1870s. In 1878 he lost much of his fortune in his bank there — the first gold bank in Southern California, and he struggled in the interim.
By 1878, Jesse B. Ball built a logging camp that also became the market hub of the middle part of Skagit river. Originally called Ball's Camp and then Ball's Landing, this site two miles west of Sedro eventually became the village of Sterling, most of which was long ago swallowed up by the river. Ball's Camp became a natural stop for sternwheelers. In May of 1878, David Batey and Joseph Hart, childhood friends from England, poled up the Skagit past Ball's camp as far as the present site of Hamilton and then backtracked to a site two miles east of Sterling. They liked the sandbars at a horseshoe bend of the river that they named Hart's island, a natural Indian campground for centuries. They built a cabin up the slope from the slough and began felling massive trees and clearing land. Within months they were joined by two other immigrants from the British Isles, Robert Dunlop from England and William Woods from Ireland, to make a barbershop quartet of bachelors.
From sketchy records of those days, we know that Mortimer sold his palatial Santa Barbara mansion for $10,000, the same amount he invested up north (the mansion was restored in 1996). With his capital he acquired timber rights over the next ten years for 2,200 acres of forest that ranged north from the shore of the Skagit River, up and over what is now Duke's Hill to the area we now call Warner's Prairie. John Warner, the prairie's namesake, was Mortimer's companion in the California gold fields, the 1858 Fraser River Gold rush and at Cook's Ferry in British Columbia. After Mortimer returned to his hometown of Mansfield, Ohio, to marry Nan Pollock in 1864, Warner married Ellen Thompson, a member of the Cook's Ferry band of the Thompson Indian tribe. She was rumored to be the daughter or sister of the chief of the tribe. Warner moved down to Edison in the late 1860s after helping construct the coal mines in Bellingham. In 1882 he and his family homesteaded pasture land in the middle of the forest, five miles north of future Sedro. It soon took the name of Warner's Prairie. Warner's son Charlie logged much of Cook's acreage and later owned a saloon in old Sedro.
The spot where Mortimer started Sedro was east from the Batey and Hart acreage on 34 acres that he bought outright from pioneer William Woods. He built his general store where the Riverfront Park barbecue pits now stand. There are no artifacts left, just the bucolic scenery along the river that Mortimer's family cherished as their real home. The history books generally cite 1884 as the year that Mortimer arrived, but we find some evidence that he may have searched for timber here in earlier years, possibly after communicating with Warner. He may have even traveled here in 1858 when he invested with Whatcom founder Henry Roeder in a pack train from Bellingham to the Fraser River gold claims in British Columbia. Whenever he came, he hooked up with Batey and Hart and discovered that Indians chose to ford the Skagit at a point near Batey Slough. Mortimer definitely knew where to ford rivers. Cook's Ferry was his first successful river crossing and ten years later he started another ferry and then replaced it with a tollbridge over the Kansas River near Topeka, Kansas, the first iron bridge in that area. He knew that the right river crossing meant business.

These are photos of the interior of the Cook home. The top photo is of the fireplace. The photos show a much better furnished home than any that were located in the upper Skagit River region in 1885. Ten years later, on Oct. 30, 1895, Nina Cook married Standish Budlong of Rockford, Illinois, in front of that fireplace. These photos are exclusive copies from the originals, which were discovered in the scrapbook of Barbara Taggart, Cook's granddaughter. She was Nina's daughter and her descendants, the Chanson family of Rockford, provided the facsimiles, which are among the items the Journal is donating to the Sedro-Woolley Museum in 2011. The bottom photo is of the parlor.

Bugs dive-bomb Cook's townsite Mortimer hired carpenter David Batey to construct the first commercial building in this area, a general store, right next to his wharf on the river. Batey also built the Cook family home northwest up the slope, with all the modern furnishings. Batey built the first house here for his own family in 1880 on what is now the Rhodes Road, west of Sedro-Woolley. On June 25, 1885, Mortimer moved his family up from Santa Barbara to join him, and on December 7 he established a post office named Sedro. The store was built with a façade. That was not unusual by itself. Most western frontier towns sported buildings with a false front that implied a second story, which gave the impression of more substance or wealth. Mortimer went one step further. He put a window in his façade, and we can imagine that investors were mightily impressed when they saw it from the deck of a steamboat.
When Mortimer was originally here without his family, he named the town, Bug, in his own inimitable way, after the mosquitoes that bedeviled loggers in the swamps that covered the low ground north of the river, the ones that they swore approached the size of bats. He even had Batey paint a sign on his general store with the unusual moniker and goods were shipped to that address, at least so the tale goes. The other settler families were not fond of the name, however, partly in fear that denigrators would prefix the name with "hum-". One story explains that Batey's wife Georgiana convinced Mortimer to accept a variation of the Spanish word for cedar, cedra. But the word is actually, cedro. Another story ascribes the name suggestion to George Wicker, who emigrated here from Kansas with his brothers at the same time as Cook arrived. Cook entertained all suggestions for a name and the 1906 Illustrated History book notes that several were considered, including Charlotte and Denver. But imitative names would not do for Cook, who suspected that this would be the last town he would father. Some fanciful tales persist that he wanted to name it after himself but no such record insists. All of those stories ignore the obvious. Cook spent nearly 15 years in a town where speaking Spanish was a valuable business tool. Mortimer apparently changed the last letter of cedro, the Spanish word for cedar, and voila. The small community of 20 people finally coalesced around the name Sedro and the town name became yet another example of serendipitous Western adaptation.
The following excerpt from the August 1890 edition of the Washington Magazine is the earliest reference to the town name controversy we have found. Cook might have been pulling the writer's leg a bit — since there is no record that he ever submitted the Bug name to the U.S. Post Office — but it made good copy. Cook learned how to inspire ink in prior decades in Topeka and Santa Barbara.

Mr. Cook, being a man of ingenious and original turn of mind, determined to give the future town a name which would be at once unique and without duplicate. Mr. Cook spent several days, so tradition tells us, earnestly scrutinizing the names of the various post offices of the United States, together with the "Blue Book," but among them all he is reported to have found no mane in the universe which had not been chosen, and some times, for the hundredth time, with the exception of one, which, on account of its originality, its concise and euphonious spelling he adopted directly. That was Bug.
The post office superintendent wrote Mr. Cook, congratulating him, and approving his choice [apocryphal]; and things might have gone serenely on for an indefinite period had not an unforeseen contingency arisen which might have resulted disastrously, but was happily averted. Letters began to arrive addressed thus: Mrs. Jno. Jones, Bug, Washington [Ed. note: this part of the story may be apocryphal because we have not found any record of an application for a Bug post office.] When in one or two cases the name of the town occupied the place of an affix to the name of the individual, the delicate spirit of Western propriety could stand the unintended slur no longer. One Sunday afternoon an indignation meeting was held, during which a formal interview with the postmaster took place. Said a man to Mr. Cook: "Do you spell the name of this town with two 'g's?"
"No," replied Mr. Cook, "I spell it B-U-G and one 'g' is enough." This was the climax. The people assembled, then and there resolved that the name of the town should be changed, and accordingly the town was called Sedro, paraphrased from the Spanish cedra or cedar.

In June 1885 Mortimer moved his family up from Santa Barbara to join him via schooner and two successive steamboats. His daughter Nina, 16 at the time, described the trip in her wonderful diary that you can see in the Sedro-Woolley Museum:

We have gone north to Washington Territory, Sedro, Skagit County. We left Santa Barbara June 9, 1885, and coming up on the steamboat Queen of the Pacific, arrived in Sedro on the Steamboat Glide, June 25. We found a cute, dear, pretty, little white house all waiting for us, and the loveliest trees and ferns and flowers and most beautiful place altogether, that I ever, ever saw. A little boat on the river bank to go rowing on the Skagit in, and a near prospect of a horse to go on horseback.

Mortimer and Nan's wedding 1863

In those years before the railroad arrived in 1889, travel up and down the river was by sternwheeler steamboat, by canoe or by foot. The forests between Cook's townsite and Mount Vernon were very dense and only muddy trails followed the shoreline, so even horses could not speed up the journey. We do not know when Nina got her wish for a horse, but we see her riding one in a photo on this website. A horse for riding would have been rare here in the 1880s. The few horses that were owned by settlers then were intended for logging. Pioneer Frank Hoehn was the first settler to bring in large teams of horses, riding the first pack over Cascade Pass in 1889. Nina's older sister Fairie was a teacher here and she exhibited her father's grit by filing a land claim herself. Nan Pollock Cook became one of the most beloved members of the community, helping organize the first religious services and being a good neighbor when young wives tried to cope with the wilderness and isolation here in the 1880s and '90s. [Link is fixed]

Bug becomes Sedro On December 7, 1885, Cook established a post office named Sedro, partly because he needed an official address for delivery of the weekly Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper to his wharf by steamboat. Cook originally built a mill for all kinds of timber next to his wharf. Later, in May 1886, he began to specialize in the milling of cedar shingles. His shingle mill was the first one of its kind in the county and possibly the first in the Northwest. He manufactured shingles from bolts of Western red cedar for siding, roofs, and interior finish of houses. The rapid movement west of settlers had created a need that could not be satisfied from other sources. Western red cedar became the wood of choice because of its resistance to warping and rot. Cottonwood trees were nearly as common as cedar along the river here, but cottonwood warps and is not suitable for housing materials. More than a dozen shingle mills sprang up in the upper-Skagit area by the turn of the century.
The old Cook mill eventually burned on April 9, 1889, but Mortimer had sold it to the McDonald & McEwan Co. in October of the year before. Although his mill was never as financially successful as he hoped, Cook's foresight about shingles was the key to Sedro's early growth and his land became very valuable when the Fairhaven Land Co. came shopping for land in old Sedro. By then, Mortimer decided that he wanted to raise hogs on a farm four miles west of town on a muddy trail that became the present Cook road. We will tell that story in an upcoming installment.

Epilogue In the early 1890s, Cook tired of his postmaster duties after the Fairhaven & Southern Railway connected Sedro with Fairhaven. His late granddaughter Barbara Taggart found this letter that was reprinted in an undated Sedro newspaper and it illustrates just how cantankerous he could be: It was addressed to: "Fourth Postmaster General, Washington D.C.

Dear Sir:
I have served my country faithfully through the war with Mexico; I served her faithfully through the war of the Rebellion. I have served her faithfully as postmaster at Sedro since 1886. I have sent in my resignation three times and you have paid no attention to it. Unless I am relieved within ten days, I'll throw the [expletive apparently censored] post office in the river."

A telegram swiftly returned authorizing him to turn the position over to his successor, George Hopp. By the way, George Hopp will show up again in our history. He was the editor of the town's first newspaper, Sedro Press, starting in April 1890. He was also elected the first mayor of Sedro on March 4, 1891, by roughly 200 male citizens.
Cook nearly went bankrupt again during the Depression of the 1890s and he liquidated his assets to travel to the Philippines in search of another fortune in the mahogany forests there. He died of dysentery on Iloilo Island on Nov. 22, 1899, and is buried there. His family moved away to Illinois around the turn of the century. Their descendants returned to help launch the first Founders Weekend during Loggerodeo of 1994.

Mea Culpa: Confession is good for the soul Mea culpa, cedro Even our overworked award-winning team of Journal fact checkers and copy editors blow it big time now and then. This time, however, their mistakes are both repeated and egregious. While they are behind the woodshed being flogged, we apologize and admit the errors. Over the years, we have variously written that the Spanish word for cedar was cedra or sedra. But, dear reader, once your humble editor actually consulted a dictionary, he discovered the Spanish word is instead, cedro. Therefore, Mortimer Cook simply changed the c to s.

More Cook stories on the web:

The recently discovered proof of how and when Mortimer Cook's town of Bug became Sedro.
Brief introduction to Cook and family.
The diary of Nina Cook, daughter of the founder of Sedro, written while she was a teenager in Sedro in the 1880s. Part Two added in 2011. See all the Cook links there.
How Fairie Cook, daughter of the founder of Sedro, staked a timber claim of her own near future Alger in 1887.
Ray Jordan's memories of growing up as a child on Mortimer Cook's ranch on what is now Cook road west of Sedro-Woolley, and how he slept on top of dynamite boxes.
Several more Cook stories are planned for the next year, including Mortimer's complete biography, as we complete our book in progress, "Humbug!"— Mortimer Cook.
See our new Ray Jordan Portal section with links to his 36, and still counting, Ray Jordan stories, including 29 chapters of his book, Ray's Writin's. And five of those are the first chapters of the book, with more than 200 names of pioneers, and more than a hundred of our own annotations and footnotes, so you can learn who they were.
Part One of our totally updated story of the Fairhaven & Southern Railway, which chugged into old Sedro on Christmas eve, 1889, as the first standard-gauge railroad in the state, north of Seattle. Includes profiles of F&S pioneers Nelson Bennett and John J. Donovan and the birth of the two Sedro towns. Shared from our optional Subscribers Edition.

Story posted on Feb. 23, 2002, last updated on Dec. 24, 2010
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Our newest sponsor, Plumeria Bay, is based in Birdsview, just a short walk away from the Royal family's famous Stumpranch, and is your source for the finest down comforters, pillows, featherbeds andduvet covers and bed linens. Order directly from their website and learn more about this intriguing local business.

Oliver-Hammer Clothes Shop at 817 Metcalf Street in downtown Sedro-Woolley, 90 years continually in business.

Peace and quiet at the Alpine RV Park, just north of Marblemount on Hwy 20, day, week or month, perfect for hunting or fishing. Park your RV or pitch a tent — for as little as $5 per night — by the Skagit River, just a short drive from Winthrop or Sedro-Woolley. Alpine is doubling in capacity for RVs and camping in 2011.

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Mortimer Cook, founder of Bug and Sedro key figure all over America

Mortimer Cook, founder of Bug and Sedro
key figure all over America