Mount Coffin stood on the lower Columbia at the meeting of the Columbia and Cowlitz rivers in present-day Longview, Washington. Long before it received its English name, it was a sacred Cowlitz burial ground where the dead were placed above ground in canoes. Euro-American explorers and visitors recorded the site from 1792 onward, noting both its prominence and the burial practices there; some accounts also reflected trade with local people, while others involved intrusion and damage, including the burning of burial canoes in 1841. In 1929, industrial development erased the hill when it was dynamited and quarried for gravel during construction of the Port of Longview.