Mount Coffin
Mount Coffin was a once approximately 250-foot-high rock on the riverbank of the Columbia near the city of Longview, Washington State. It served as a burial site for the local indigenous population, the Cowlitz people. The rock was first described by Lieutenant William R. Broughton in 1792, who named it Coffin because of the dead bodies posited in canoes on the rock’s summit. Because of its striking features, Mount Coffin was an important landmark for indigenous people and early Western explorers such as Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. In the 20th century the former landmark was turned into a rock quarry, completely levelled in the 1950s, and has been used by the Weyerhaeuser Company as industrial area ever since. The slow destruction of Mount Coffin and the replacement of this geographical landmark by ‘colonial landmarks’ —such as factory buildings and logging bridges—illustrate the different ways of claiming, shaping, and stewarding land by indigenous and colonial agents. read more...
