Kelso is a city in the southwestern share of the U.S. state of Washington and is the county chair of Cowlitz County. At the 2010 census, the population was 11,925. Kelso is ration of the Longview, Washington Metropolitan Statistical Area, which has a population of 102,410. Kelso shares its long western link up with Longview. It is close Mount St. Helens.

The archaic known inhabitants of Kelso were Native Americans from the Cowlitz tribe. The Cowlitz people were not speaking into the Upper (or Taidnapam) and Lower (or Mountain) Cowlitz tribes, who were members of the Sahaptin and Salish language families, respectively. In 1855, European explorers noted that there numbered greater than 6000 individuals of the Cowlitz Tribe.

Kelso was founded by Peter W. Crawford, a Scottish surveyor, who, in 1847, took occurring the first donation land affirmation on the Lower Cowlitz River. Crawford platted a townsite which he named after his home town of Kelso, Scotland. The native plat was obsolete and filed in October 1884. It became incorporated in 1889.

In its prematurely days, Kelso obtained the nickname “Little Chicago” as it became well-known for its large number of taverns and brothels that catered to local loggers. On weekends, trainloads of loggers would come into town from the surrounding region looking for women, liquor, gambling and fights. The FBI finally motivated the mayor to shut them beside in the 1950s when the last tavern/brothel closing in the mid-1960s. The economy continues to be based largely upon wood products.

In the late 19th century and into the first portion of the 20th century, Kelso was the middle for commercial smelt fishing upon the Cowlitz River. In 1910, according to the Oregonian Newspaper, 5,000 tons of fish were caught. The Kelso Chamber of Commerce created the slogan in 1956 and became known as the Smelt Capital of the World. The Cowlitz River has historically had unventilated runs of smelt and were shipped to markets approaching the country. Smelt numbers have declined significantly in the behind several decades possibly due to overharvesting, global climate fiddle with and address loss.