The City That Built Itself: Seattle’s Boastful Declaration of Independence

To-day and every other day Seattle speaks for herself. She has twenty thousand people. She has five banks with an aggregate capital of half a million and aggregate deposits of two millions and a half. She has forty-two wholesale and jobbing houses employing two millions and a half of capital, and covering all heavy merchandise lines. She has a multitude of retail stores whose aggregate sales reach ten millions of dollars per year.

She is the terminus of four railway lines... Seattle has the Territorial university, public schools in which nearly three thousand children are instructed. She has six newspapers, eight saw-mills, two ship yards, one dry dock, four foundries, one soap factory, one cracker factory, one ice factory, five candy factories, five brick yards, four furniture factories, five carriage works, one tannery, two box factories, two marble works, five coal yards, four breweries, two grist mills, two creosoting works, four sash and door factories and other manufacturing establishments too numerous to mention.

Over one hundred steamboats make Seattle their headquarters... Seattle is the radiating point for nearly all the business of Puget Sound. This fact proceeds first from the advantage of central position and in nearly equal degree from the attraction of a large and preeminent trade organisation.

Seattle is the depot of three large coal mines and of the largest and best iron mines in the world, which is now being developed. An average of sixty ships leave her docks each month, double the tonnage departing from any rival port.

In all respects Seattle is the leading city of Puget Sound and of the Territory. She leads in population, wealth, volume of trade, in transportation facilities, in commerce, in manufacture—in short, she leads in all the conditions and activities which make the progressive era now current. The prosperity of Seattle is not a boon. It is a reflection of actualities, of growing population and expanding industry.

Seattle made her place and holds it in the face of the most determined opposition. She has met and still meets discrimination and bitter opposition. What she gained through advantages of nature she is holding and building upon through the energy and spirit of her people.

...Seattle has doubled her population, trebled her industries and quadrupled her business in the past four years. Eight hundred dwellings have been built in Seattle since the 1st of last January.