The Capital Cut Off

Olympia has passed through one Sunday without any trains or mail service, except what little relief came via Tenino over the Port Townsend Southern. The Northern Pacific station was locked and for twenty-four hours Olympia was figuratively blotted off all Northern Pacific maps. When Monday morning came, the people were quite accustomed to the loss of the trains, consequently when a cloud of smoke came up from the eastern valley along toward noon and the shrill whistle of a locomotive was heard, 6,000 residents of the state capital ran out pell-mell with buckets in their hands, thinking there was a fire somewhere. Imagine their surprise to see a train crawl through the tunnel and stop at the station. It is said that a small boy had been sent afoot across the country from Tacoma to notify Olympians that the cars were coming, but he got mired in the Nisqually bottoms. A peculiar condition exists. A man wrote a business letter to a firm in Seattle at 3:15 last Saturday afternoon. It reached Seattle last night and will be delivered to the firm this forenoon. An answer will be written and mailed and it cannot reach Olympia until noon tomorrow. In other words, to transact business between two cities eighty miles apart connected with a direct line of railroad and a double daily service of steamboats, it takes three days, twenty hours and forty-five minutes to get an answer.