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Coat the wood liberally with a 50/50 mix of linseed oil and turpentine. Let it fully soak in and dry for at least a month.

Then paint the boards with oil based primer and let dry for a week. Apply two coats of the paint of your choice - like porch paint.

You must have a different species of Cottonwood there. The stuff up here (we call it Cottonweed) isn't even good for firewood. It's brittle and branches break off just from snow accumulating on them. There's no way I'd try and make bed wood out of it. The fuzz covered seeds blow everywhere and the pods dropping on a car will ruin the paint.

Populus deltoides. Eastern cottonwood. Likely different than your "popple" or "quakey" trees. Eastern cottonwood trees reach an immense height and diameter.
The name cottonwood refers to the way the wood fibers stay together, making for a durable board for a big trailer. I certainly wouldn't recommend it for our trucks.

Tulip poplar has a tendency to shrink dramatically after milling. Needs to be completely dry before cutting to size. It is straight grained and as usable as southern yellow pine, just don't let it get wet.

That's one advantage of Southern Yellow Pine. It has a lot of resin in it that acts sort of like a self waterproofing agent.

The best is the stuff from out west, Ponderosa pine.

An option for guys in the Pacific Northwest is Alaska Yellow Cedar.

From Wikipedia. "Due to its slow growth it is hard and, like other cypress woods, it is durable; it therefore offers good dimensional stability and is resistant to weather, insects, and contact with soil. It works easily with hand or machine tools, turning and carving quite well."

The key to southern yellow pine resiliency back when these trucks were made was the availability of old growth trees. These trees were slow growing due to stiff competition for sunlight in unthinned natural conditions. This resulted in many more growth rings per inch in diameter than what our modern plantation pines have. Tighter growth rings results in more resin in the boards thus less prone to rot.

Yep. My last house was built entirely out of old growth SYP in the 1920s here in Atlanta.

I counted over 200 rings in a section of 4x6 framing I removed. The tree was probably 500 years old or more.

The 1x8 clapboard siding was so tight and full of resin you had to pre-drill it to use nails, and screws were even tough to get into it. No rot or termites anywhere. That stuff was harder than oak.