The Secret Arrival of the Southern Pacific
A new rail incorporation is revealed to be the northern tentacle of a powerful California monopoly, promising to reshape Seattle into a major railway terminus.
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.
On another page we print a full copy of articles filed with the county clerk yesterday, incorporating the Seattle and Southern Railroad Company. The object of this corporation is to build and operate a railroad between Seattle and Portland, Oregon, connecting at the latter place with the Southern Pacific system. It is not stated in so many words that this line is to be a link in the Southern Pacific system, but the circumstances speak for themselves. The principal incorporator, Mr. Brown, is a director of the Southern Pacific and is intimately known in the circles of that road. Mr. Cadwalader, formerly chief engineer of the Stanford-Crocker roads, is now a confidential friend and associate of the Southern Pacific. Mr. Prescott is the president of the Union Iron Works of San Francisco, which is closely allied with the Southern Pacific. Mr. Ewing is well-known in Seattle as the purchaser of the West Seattle tract, which is now being laid out with reference to large future development. This conclusion is inevitable: this projected road is simply the Southern Pacific under another name, and its northern terminus is to be Seattle.
“In two years from this time, Seattle will be the second railroad center of the Pacific coast, only equaled in importance as a 'railroad port' by San Francisco.”
In 1888, Seattle was a boomtown obsessed with the 'railroad war'—the race to secure the terminus of transcontinental lines. Today, the struggle has shifted from steel rails to transit corridors and urban density, but the city's anxiety over being transformed by outside corporate interests remains a constant of Seattle's civic DNA.
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