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| Year | Stories |
|---|---|
| 1872 | 2 |
| 1876 | 1 |
| 1877 | 2 |
| 1882 | 3 |
| 1883 | 1 |
| 1884 | 3 |
| 1885 | 2 |
| 1886 | 1 |
| 1887 | 1 |
| 1889 | 6 |
| 1890 | 1 |
| 1891 | 4 |
| 1892 | 2 |
| 1893 | 2 |
| 1894 | 2 |
| 1895 | 5 |
| 1899 | 1 |
| 1904 | 1 |
| 1908 | 1 |
| 1909 | 2 |
| 1911 | 1 |
| 1917 | 1 |
| 1923 | 1 |
| 1928 | 1 |
47 stories matching obvious
- The Floating Poker Game Fleecing Klondike Gold Miners
Returning prospectors, heavy with gold and exhaustion, were systematically targeted by a professional gambling syndicate on the passenger steamers coming into Seattle.
- The Unfinished Ditch That Could Have Remade Seattle
An 1877 proposal to carve a channel between Lake Washington and the Sound highlights the ambitious—and forgotten—infrastructure dreams that once defined the city’s early development.
- Everett's Economy Drive — While the City Kept Paying Boston for Its Water
As officials cut six policemen to save money, the Labor Journal asked the obvious question: why pay a private company three times what publicly owned Bellingham pays for water and lights?
- The Saloon-Keepers’ Council
A scathing editorial exposes how Seattle’s early city government was dominated by saloon owners, liquor distributors, and property men who thrived on the vice trade.
- The Labor Journal’s Lesson in Hypocrisy
A satirical exchange exposes the double standards applied to organized labor versus corporate 'community of interest' trusts.
- One Coal-Oil Dealer Is Holding Olympia's New Electric Railway Hostage for $10,000
The streetcar line is contracted, the rails are shipped and the crews are ready — but George Marvin Savage's outfit sits squarely in the middle of Main Street, and he will not budge for less than ten thousand dollars.
- The Prosecutor Picked Prosser: Kennewick Demands His Resignation
Benton County's prosecuting attorney tells the commissioners he is 'prejudiced in favor of Prosser' in the court house bond fight — and the Kennewick editor says a public official has no right to a favorite side.
- 'As Cold as a Barn': The Olympia Theater Fight That Spilled Into Print
When the Tribune panned the Olympia Theater, the rival Standard accused it of kicking without reason. The rebuttal names icy dressing rooms, one-dollar seats and a manager in over his head.
- The Property Battle for Old Seattle
A lawyer and property claimant fight to secure titles to a sprawling Seattle donation land claim amidst territorial legal confusion.
- The Washington–Idaho Line Was Never Quite Where Everyone Thought It Was
A congressional committee moving to re-mark the boundary publishes a surveyor general's confession: the 1873 line zigzagged as much as a degree and a half off course, was measured with link chains, and stopped short when the crew quit to save their own lives.
- The Timber Tax Trap: How Snohomish County’s Wealth Was Slipping Away
A local writer warns that mill companies are exploiting a flawed $2.50-per-acre tax assessment to monopolize land, leaving the county with debt and no court house while small loggers go bust.
- The City That Grew from Timber to Town in 18 Months
A promotional puff piece reveals Aberdeen’s explosive growth: population jumping from 800 to over 2,000, with a $35,000 monthly payroll and the best electric lights in Washington.
- The Boy Who Wanted a Gun: Seattle’s Satirical Take on Sunday School Prizes
A local columnist mocks the absurdity of juvenile weekly papers offering .32-caliber revolvers to boys who recruit eight subscribers, arguing that this 'philanthropy' teaches murder rather than morality.
- Broke at the End of Every Cannery Season: A Filipino Columnist's Plea for a Savings System
Writing for Seattle's Filipino community in 1928, Macario C. Rebodos traces the hard cycle of Alaskan cannery work and agricultural harvests — money earned, money spent, and pawnshops waiting at the end of it — and argues that an endowment policy is the only discipline that will break it.
- Spokane Falls Wins the Land Office—and Sprague Howls
A Sprague paper accused Spokane Falls of backroom land speculation to land the federal Land Office. The Review answered with boosterish fury and a warning to the 'upper country.'
- The Single Tax: A Seattle Paper Takes On Henry George
In 1894 the Post-Intelligencer mounts a full-throated attack on Henry George's land-value tax, warning it would 'rob labor' and hand the ground itself to the rich.
- The Fund That Grew While the Injured Went Hungry
Washington's 1911 workmen's compensation law was meant to protect the men who built the state. A decade later, the lumber industry was paying less into the accident fund than ever — and injured workers were getting a fraction of what the cost of living demanded.
- The Tacoma Gold Rush That Was Salted With Quicksilver
A mining journal exposes how placer claims on Tacoma school land turned a public trust into a speculative jackpot—complete with imported gold, alleged bribery, and a land office that kept saying yes.
- Seattle's Pitch to Host the 1897 Christian Endeavor Convention: Cheap Fares, Empty Boom Hotels and 85-Degree Summers
Local Endeavorers lobby all thirty-seven trustees to bring the international convention to Seattle, arguing that four transcontinental railroads, vacant boom-time hotels and a mild July make the city the obvious choice over San Francisco.
- The Gall and Wormwood of Olympia: Tacoma’s Defeat in the Senate Race
As Washington's first U.S. Senator is chosen in a bitter legislative battle, defeated candidate Calkins' supporters cry foul, while Jefferson County delegates secure the victory for Watson Squire.
- The Delegate Who Sold Seattle’s Future for Five Thousand Dollars
A scathing editorial in the Puget Sound Dispatch accuses Territorial Delegate George Freeman Willard of betraying Seattle’s interests—specifically the mud flats of Duwamish Bay—to secure his own political and financial gain, while simultaneously accepting bribes from rival railroad companies.
- Seattle's Bid to Be the Liverpool of America
In 1895, boosters imagined a Lake Washington ship canal turning Puget Sound into a freshwater harbor for world commerce, coal trade, and naval power.