The Fever and the Fall: Life in a Frontier Boomtown

Let us return to the new towns. Three times within one year did fortune come knocking to the door of a man I know. Once at Seattle, when that town was a gray blur after a fire; once at Tacoma, in the days when the steam tram ran off the rails twice a week; and once at Spokane. But in the roar of the land boom he did not hear her. Of all the excitements that life offers there are few to be compared to the whirl of a red-hot boom; it is strictly moral because you do fairly earn your unearned increment by labor, perspiration, and sitting up far into the night. Consider all that is in it: the headlong stampede to the new place; the money dashed down like counters for merest daily bread; the arrival of the piled cars whence the raw material of a city—men, lumber and shingle—are shot on to the not yet nailed platform. The heaving up amid shouts and yells of the city's one electric light—a raw, sizzling arc atop of an untacked pine pole; the sweating, jostling mob at the sale of town lots; the real estate agents themselves, lost novelists of prodigious imagination. After a while, things settle down. Or else—the bottom has tumbled out of the boom and the town new-made is dead—dead as a young man's corpse laid out in the morning. Of 10,000 not 300 remain, and these live in huts on the outskirts of the brick streets. The hotel, with its suites of musty rooms, is a tomb; the factory chimneys are cold; the fire-weed grows in the center of the driveways, mocking the arrogant advertisements in the empty shops.