USA > Washington > History of Washington; the rise and progress of an American state, Vol. IV > Part 18
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after which a full afternoon's work was added to what had been done during the morning. Three hundred men and seventy-five ladies were on the ground during this first day, and fully a mile of the right of way was cleared, a consider- able part of which was also graded.
As in Seattle, this work was continued one day in the week for a considerable time, but finally began to languish. How- ever, a considerable stretch of grade was thrown up during that year and the two years following, and in 1878, the iron and a locomotive were purchased in San Francisco, with the bonds which the county had voted, and cars were built at Tumwater. The road was completed during July, and on August Ist, a free excursion to Tenino was given, in which nearly everybody in the town took a ride over the line which now gave them railroad connection with the outside world, and in which everyone of them had a personal interest, hav- ing contributed something, either in labor or money, or both, to its construction.
There was one other part of the territory where railroad building had begun earlier and was going on at this time. When the mines in Idaho no longer furnished a market for the surplus products of the Walla Walla country, the farmers and stockgrowers of that thriving region were forced to seek an outlet by way of the river, to Portland. But it was thirty miles or more from Walla Walla to the old Hudson's Bay fort, the nearest steamboat landing, now called Wallula, and the road lay all the way through volcanic ash, into which the wheels of wagons sank deeply, while in places the alkali dust was suffocating for both horses and drivers. It cost $5, $10, $12 and sometimes $13 per ton to have wheat and other products hauled over this road to the river, depending on the quantity awaiting shipment, and sometimes the team
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owners charged extra for waiting to unload at the landing. Then the charge was $6 per ton for the trip down the river. From Wallula to Portland the freight had to be transferred from the steamboat to a portage railway at Celilo, by which it went fourteen miles around Celilo Rapids to the Dalles; there it was again transferred to boat by which it went to the upper Cascades, where it was again transferred to a tramway, over which it went six miles to the lower landing, where it was taken on board another boat by which it went forty miles down the Columbia and ten up the Willamette to its destination.
To save some part of this excessive cost of transportation, particularly between Walla Walla and Wallula, the people had long hoped for a railroad. They had procured a charter for one in 1862, but the charter had not built the road, neither had any capitalist or road builder appeared, who would do so. While collectively they might have built a road that would have served their purpose, if they could have agreed upon a plan, and set to work with proper resolutions, they were without a leader, and did nothing.
But finally the required leader appeared, and he was found among their own number. Dr. Dorsey S. Baker had been one among the earliest to reach the town and remain in it when the gold hunters were hurrying through it to Idaho. He had come to Oregon in 1848 from Illinois, where he was born, and where he had practised medicine for a time, and had reached the Willamette only a short time before the gold discoveries in California. In 1861, in company with his brother-in-law, John F. Boyer, he had taken a small stock of merchandise and some cattle to Walla Walla, the outfitting point, for the newly discovered mines at Orofino and Florence, and from that time forth devoted himself to general business.
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The firm prospered, and by the time the demand for a rail- road began to be felt, the doctor had become a leading man in the community, and one of the richest. He had been named with thirty-two others among the incorporators of the Walla Walla Railroad, in its charter, but like the others did nothing about the actual building of the road until 1871.
Then he went at the work in earnest. A company was organized, but its stockholders and officers seem to have realized that all that was to be done the doctor must do, and they would interfere with him as little as possible. This was probably quite to his liking, for he was one of those self-reliant men who rarely require advice from others. As Napoleon refused to take the sword of Frederick the Great, when he might have done so because he had his own, Dr. Baker cared little for the opinions of others once his own had been formed. He accordingly went at the work in his own way, and so completely did he have it from first to last, that the road was spoken of at the time, and has always been known since as Dr. Baker's railroad. He was its fiscal agent, and furnished or procured most of the capital required; he was its general manager, superintendent and board of direc- tors-in everything at least but in name. During his owner- ship the road was never mortgaged.
He did not undertake to build a finished railroad at the beginning. He knew, or thought he knew, that such a task was beyond his ability or that of the community. A tram- way would be sufficient if it could be constructed and operated, and the country was developing so rapidly that it seemed probable that a tramway might, under proper management, grow into such a road as everybody hoped for. He accordingly set out to build a road with wooden rails, beginning at Wallula and extending gradually up the valley,
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as means could be provided. He selected a landing place on the Columbia about a mile above the town, built a steam sawmill there, and sent men into the forest on the Grande Ronde to cut logs and raft them down the Snake River. He also had timber cut on the headwaters of the Yakima, and sent down to the Columbia in a similar way.
He went personally into the field and assisted the engineers in locating the line. He superintended the grading, and, in time, directed the preparation of the fir stringers which were to be used as rails, and noted with care and doubtless with anxiety the results of this primitive method of railroad building, as they appeared.
As the line gradually stretched away up the river toward Walla Walla, his wooden rails were subjected to a severe test in transporting nothing but materials for construction, and he observed with some disappointment, as it may well be presumed, that they were not enduring the wear as he had hoped they would. He then began to protect them with strap iron, particularly at the curves where the grinding of the wheels damaged them most rapidly, and found, as earlier railroad builders than he had found, that the experiment was only fairly successful. The straps turned up at the ends under the pressure of the wheels, and occasionally a rail gave way, or a bridge that was not too substantially built, failed under the pressure of his train, so that interrup- tions of traffic after it was begun, were frequent and annoying.
The people watched the doctor's experiments with interest though they did not always give him the encouragement he was entitled to expect, and had reason to hope for. They even laughed at his embarrassments, and predicted disaster for the future, and when the road was so far completed that
DR. DORSEY S. BAKER.
One of the early merchants of Walla Walla; founded the first bank in that place, which is now the Baker- Boyer National, and finally built the railroad to Wallula.
THE RISE AND PROGRESS ЯЗНАЯ С ТАРЯОД .ЯО
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it had begun to be serviceable, they would sometimes say, if an accident occurred and the train failed to reach its des- tination on time, that the coyotes had eaten out a section of the doctor's track. This slur gave the enterprise its designa- tion as the "rawhide" road, the explanation of the joke being that the doctor was coating his rails with rawhide to protect them, and that the coyotes were eating it off, when the track was not carefully watched.
But the doctor paid but little attention to these pleasant- ries, and continued to push his work with vigor and courage. The first ten miles of track was constructed entirely with fir rails, cut at his own mill. Over this a little 8-ton engine hauled all the material for the construction as it was needed, and such other freight as was offered. The next year a few other miles were added, and all the wooden stringers were provided with strap iron. During the third year the rails reached Whitman's old mission near Waiilatpu. By this time the doctor had been convinced that wooden rails would not serve, and he accordingly arranged in Portland for a shipment from Wales, of enough rails, weighing 26 pounds to the yard, for the whole line so far as finished. The freight on these rails from Portland to Wallula was $15 a ton.
Furnished with iron rails, the road began to have the appearance and to render the service of a real railroad. The people of Walla Walla were more than ever anxious to have it extended to the city. But the doctor now thought it was time for them to do something themselves, if they wished a thing of so much advantage tothem, and he informed them that he would complete the line to their town and his own for $25,000. This they furnished, and Walla Walla was for the first time supplied with direct rail connection with the river.
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The city is about 600 feet higher than the bank of the river at Wallula, For the first twelve miles, the grade was so heavy that a train going west would make the entire dis- tance by gravity. In the other 18 or 19 miles, there were one or two rather heavy grades, requiring a good deal of power to get the trains over them.
For a long time after the road was built, freight was car- ried only on flat cars. Passengers were carried in something but little better. A sort of low house with a curved roof and small windows was built on a flat car, and furnished with a plain board seat that ran all the way round it except across the doorways, and this was the only passenger coach. People irreverently called it the "hearse." But many eminent people rode in it in its time. General Sherman, when he was at the head of the army was one of these. He came up the Yellowstone and over the mountains to Walla Walla, accom- panied by his staff, on a tour of inspection of the various army posts, and thought he would have a special train to take him over this very unpretentious road to Wallula, but Dr. Baker thought differently. Tradition says he told the general that if he went at all he would go on a freight car, and sit astride a wheat sack at that, but tradition is sometimes at fault in matters of this kind. The truth is he went in the "hearse " as other people did, and was quite satisfied to do so.
The immediate effect of the completion of this primitive railroad was to reduce the cost of transporting the produce of the Walla Walla farms from the town to the river landing to $5 per ton. Five dollars per ton was the rate for wheat, for merchandise, for lumber or for cordwood. There were no classifications as at the present day. A ton was a ton whether of feathers or hardware, and whether going west or east. Five dollars was also the rate for each passenger,
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so the books of the company were easily kept. The road became very profitable, was eventually sold at a good price, and became a part of the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company system.
It was the first railroad built in Washington, if the portage road, from the upper to the lower Cascade, built by the Ore- gon Steam Navigation Company, is left out of consideration.
Dr. Baker also established the first bank in Washington -first as a private bank in 1869, now the Baker-Boyer National. He was a strong character with a marked genius for finance.
During the years of depression following the panic of 1873, the Northern Pacific Railroad made but little progress, par- ticularly in Washington. For a part of the time at least the roads the people were themselves building with such slender means, advanced as rapidly and seemed perhaps to have as much prospect of becoming great lines, as that backed by the favor of the national government. But in 1875, coal was discovered on the upper branches of the Puyal- lup River, less than thirty miles east of Tacoma, which upon investigation proved to be of such quality as to make develop- ment of the mines desirable. The road needed coal for its engines, and people along the line and in Oregon needed it. There was every reason why the road should make a supreme effort to get the mines developed, and their product made available for use. They were within the limits of its land grant; if its rails could be extended to them it would do much to dispel the impression, so diligently cultivated by its op- ponents, that its northern branch from the Columbia across the range to the Sound would never be built. It might per- haps be the means of saving the whole of the land grant that would be acquired by building that line.
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But the road had neither the money nor credit with which to build it. It had been saved from absolute bankruptcy, during the panic years only by the most heroic efforts, and by great personal sacrifices on the part of its bondholders, who had surrendered their bonds and accepted preferred stock in place of them, in order that the property might be remort- gaged for new bonds. But the new bonds had no market and the fragments of road already completed in Minnesota, Dakota and Washington were but little more than paying the cost of operation under the most economic management possible.
By this time Charles B. Wright of Philadelphia had become president of the company. He was also president of the Tacoma Land Company, and its largest stockholder. The town had not prospered as he and others interested had hoped. The panic years had had the same depressing effect on it as on everything else. While most of the people who had been waiting for the terminus to be fixed, before choosing the town in which they would make their homes and their investments, had gone to it about the time the railroad reached it, some of those had already left it. There had been con- siderable delay in getting it platted and ready for market. A large part of the townsite had been cleared promptly, surveyors had been put to work, and Frederick Law Olm- stead, the famous landscape architect of New York, had been employed to make a plat, that it was expected would make it a most attractive city. In due time the plat was furnished, but it was so unlike the plats which people are accustomed to, that it was not accepted and Tacoma thus narrowly escaped being a far more beautiful city than it is. No attempt had been made to have the streets follow any general direction, or to make lots of any particular size.
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The contour of the ground had determined everything. The streets curved along the sides of the hills, which they ascended at easy grades. Lots and blocks were all irregular in size and shape, and in the residence section particularly, they were so arranged as to command the utmost variety of views. Those in authority at the time seemed to think this too much of an innovation on the generally accepted ideas of city platting and city planning, and this plat was put aside. Another plat was then necessary, and much time was required to make it, during which some of those who came to the new town, intending to remain in it, went else- where. However, the company pursued a liberal policy toward those who remained, permitting them to select locations which it subsequently allowed them to acquire, and by giving lots outright to schools, churches and charitable institutions, in some degree counteracted the evil effects of the long delay in getting its property ready for market.
During 1875 and 1876, the eastern part of the Northern Pacific so far as constructed, earned a little more than its operating expenses and a small surplus was accumulated. This and the money received from sales of stock in the Tacoma Land Company it was determined to use to build the line from the terminus to the coal mines, and it was so used. President Wright also bought a cargo of rails with his own individual funds or credit, and sent them to the coast by way of Cape Horn. When they arrived the grade was so far completed, that track laying began and the road was finished and in operation to Wilkeson in 1877. Other mines were soon after opened at Carbonado, and in time at other nearby points, and the new road did much to relieve the whole western part of the territory
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from the incubus of the depression which had so long afflicted it.
During these tedious years the road from Tacoma to Kalama had done but little business. One train a day each way had served for both freight and passengers. The people who had hoped so much from it when its building began, were much disappointed. Many who were not actually on the line, particularly those at Olympia and Seattle complained loudly that it discriminated against them, and with some reason. Those in Olympia were dissatisfied with the share of the joint freight rates awarded to the branch line they had built. Those in Seattle and other Sound towns, who wished to go to Portland were compelled to remain over night in Tacoma both going and coming. As the railroad still controlled the boats of the Oregon Steam Navigation Company on the Sound, and regulated their running time, it was clear to everybody that they were thus inconvenienced solely that their towns might be placed at as great a disadvantage as possible. They made such protest against this treatment as they could, and they did some things that were effective. They had elected Orange Jacobs to Congress in 1874, as one means of helping the Seattle and Walla Walla railroad, and he was urging upon the attention of Congress a series of memorials which the legislature had adopted, praying that a large part of the lands which had been withdrawn from sale or entry, in the interest of the Company, should be reopened to settlement, and that better means should be provided to enable settlers on the even numbered sections within the grant, to perfect their titles. John J. McGilvra had been sent to Washington by the settlers to assist him, and together they were making an aggressive fight in the departments, before committees
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and wherever effective work could be done, in support of the memorials. They made it appear, as was the case, that the various acts and orders in the interest of the company, were delaying the settlement of the whole western part of the territory, and so injuring the settlers whom Congress and the administration ought for every reason to protect and defend. Senator Mitchell of Oregon was also urging Con- gress to aid a road that would give Portland connection with the Union Pacific, and this was antagonistic to the Northern's interest.
Beset by these and other difficulties, as well as by its finan- cial troubles and embarrassments, the road could make but little progress. Partaking of its disadvantages, as well as of those of the times, its terminal town on the Sound grew but slowly. At the end of its first ten years of existence, it was still hardly a thriving village. But a brighter day for it, for the railroad, and for the territory was about to dawn.
MOUNT TACOMA OR MOUNT RAINIER.
For a dozen years or more after Tacoma was named and took its place on the map, nobody disputed the origin or meaning of the name-perhaps for the reason that nobody asserted it very positively, or upon any other authority than Winthrop's, or inquired further about it. In announcing that the town on Commencement Bay had been named, the Seattle Intelligencer, on November 23, 1868, said the name was "Tacoma after the Indian name of Mount Rainier." But nobody in those days, or for years later, spoke of the mountain by that name. The settlers always called it Rainier. It was so called in all official reports and documents. Wilkes several times
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mentions it by that name. Stevens had described the Yakima Indian Reservation as "commencing at Mount Rainier; running thence northerly along the ridge of the Cascade Mountains," etc. Even the Tacoma Land Com- pany, in its printed matter, advertising the town, had as late as 1878, put forth a picture of it inscribed, "New Tacoma, with a view of Mount Rainier,"* and the Tacoma newspapers, as late as February 1883, were calling the moun- tain by the name that everbody else used.
It was not until 1883 that any division of sentiment about the matter began to appear. In March of that year the Northwest Magazine, then published in New York under the patronage of the Northern Pacific Railroad, announced that "The Indian name Tacoma will hereafter be used in the guide books and other publications of the Northern Pacific Railroad, and the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company, instead of Rainier, which the English Captain Vancouver gave to this magnificent peak, when he explored the waters of Puget Sound in the last century." Then the people of the territory began to be really interested in the matter. The Tacoma Ledger quoted the above announce- ment in a brief editorial, when the magazine reached the coast some weeks later, and added that "The name Rainier never had any appropriateness, for it was adopted as a com- pliment to an English admiral, who never saw the mountain. If the newspapers in Oregon and Washington will join in the effort to restore the musical and significent Indian title, the change can be fully accomplished in a few years."
However this suggestion might have been regarded under other circumstances, it was not approved by the newspapers referred to. Those of Seattle received it with derision, and
*See opposite page.
TACOMA IN 1878.
Reproduced from an engraving published by the Tacoma Land Company, in the year named.
THE RISE AND PROGRESS
mar name Steven hadd described the
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jeg har ane division of sentiment about Y Hab & Appear. In March of that year the Mistr when published in New York under the Noorhem Pacific Railroad, announced The hoos mw Tseama will hereafter be used in of books And other publications of the Northern Ry wod il Oregon Railway and Navigation wool of Hamnier, which the English Captain magnificent peak, when he explored ouwo wo the last century." Then the Big boun to be really interested in the Tma boles quoted the above announce a last odmiil when the magazine reached the od added that "The name Rainie bois , for it was adopted as a con wwursl, who never saw the mountain Chegon and Washington will join in tofureal and significent Indian title wcomplished in a few years." in wwwhit have been regarded under not approved by the newspaper atde received it with derision, and
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most of the others in the territory outside of Tacoma, with more or less vigorous disapproval. One paper in Olympia, the Courier, in a single brief editorial, spoke of it conde- scendingly, but speedily changed its opinion and ever after- wards denounced the attempted change as vigorously as any of its contemporaries. Evidently its subscribers had pro- tested. The policy of the Northern Pacific in everything since its western terminus had been fixed upon, had made it as unpopular as it well could be. The suggestion had come from one of its publications; those in the town it had started and helped to build up to be a rival of all other towns on the Sound approved it. Under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that both the newspapers and the people in other towns should regard it with disfavor, and as time went by and towns were ruined, as in the case of Old Yakima, by the refusal of the company to stop its trains in their neigh- borhood, or by building up new towns in their vicinity, and questions of rates arose as at Spokane, it became more and more unpopular.
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