The Great Migration from the Flood Plains
Northern Pacific agent B. N. Austin predicts a wave of farming families from the flooded Mississippi and Missouri valleys to settle the Pacific Northwest.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
B. N. Austin, assistant general passenger agent of the Northern Pacific, and G. Chandler, general agent at Tacoma, were in the city yesterday. In an interview with a Post-Intelligencer reporter, Mr. Austin said: 'This is going to be a good year for tourist travel in this section. The floods in the East will bring lots of people to the Coast. Thousands of people who are drowned out in the Mississippi and Missouri valleys will be looking for new locations where they are secure from such disasters, and they will naturally turn to this section. They are the kind of people you want out here, for they are a farming people who will produce something. During the boom two years ago, there was a great immigration, but it was of the floating population who came to the cities. They did not produce anything, but lived off what others produced. What you want is farmers to go back into the country and produce something with which to trade in the cities.'
“The floods in the East will bring lots of people to the Coast. Thousands of people who are drowned out in the Mississippi and Missouri valleys will be looking for new locations.”
Climate displacement was framing Seattle's growth even in 1892. While modern housing debates focus on affordability, this piece illustrates how regional growth was once explicitly pitched as a solution to environmental catastrophe in the Midwest.
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