On December 22, 1944, the Sherman County Journal reported that about a thousand men of the 1687 Combat Engineers Battalion, the 558 Heavy Pontoon Engineers, and the 1490 Engineer Maintenance Company were encamped upriver from the small town of Rufus, about twenty-two miles east of The Dalles. At Camp Rufus, one of several temporary military camps in Oregon during World War II, tents were set up, and trucks, jeeps, tanks, and pontoon bridging sections arrived for testing on the Columbia and on the nearby Deschutes River.