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| Year | Stories |
|---|---|
| 1889 | 2 |
| 1892 | 1 |
| 1895 | 2 |
| 1897 | 2 |
| 1903 | 2 |
9 stories matching prospectus
- The Great Match Stick Swindle
A Superior Court judge exposes a massive stock-selling scheme that bilked nearly 1,000 investors out of $95,000.
- The Niagara of the Northwest: Wiring Snoqualmie Falls to Seattle
A new company with $2 million in capital proposes to harness a 265-foot waterfall 23 miles east and sell 5,000 horse power of electricity to the city — if the capitalists will foot the bill.
- Spokane Had Mining Fever, and the Men Selling the Stock Had the Only Sure Thing
A Yakima correspondent visits Spokane and finds a city where hotel clerks, newsboys and waiter girls are all buying mining shares — and where even Ezra Meeker has traded hops for a stock prospectus.
- The Ghost Town That Only Existed on Paper
How two swindlers and a 'Nebraska Cyclone' preacher conned a community with a townsite located entirely in a duck-filled salt marsh.
- Sell the Bonds, Build the Furnaces: Seattle's Steel Gamble
A 1902 prospectus asks ordinary Seattle savers to finance a Pacific Coast iron and steel empire — a furnace at Irondale, open-hearth works on the West Seattle waterfront — with a hundred dollars of stock thrown in free with every hundred-dollar bond.
- The Canal Fund Was Almost Full—and St. Louis Was Waiting
Seattle waterway boosters needed $50,000 to start contract No. 3. With a deadline looming, Eugene Semple promised the money in three or four days.
- The Gentrification of Early Seattle
A 1889 land prospectus uses the promise of a new streetcar line to drive up property values, listing an elite roster of buyers to signal progress—and profit.
- A $10,000 Co-op With No Fruit in the Store
A Seattle farm reporter walks into the Tacoma offices of the Washington Fruit Produce Union to find both its manager and secretary conveniently 'out of town,' an empty warehouse, a treasurer who ran off with the funds — and hundreds of farmers who had just paid $5 apiece to join.
- The Judge’s Double Life: Seduction, Abortion, and the Cover-Up That Shook Tacoma
In 1889, a young canvasser named Sadie Brantner took the stand to accuse Pierce County Probate Judge James Wickersham of luring her into a trap in Seattle, forcing an illegal abortion, and paying her off to silence. The trial revealed a web of deceit involving fake names, land fraud, and medical conspiracies.