The Hidden Cost of Shipping Raw Hides
Seattle is exporting its wealth in the form of raw animal skins and buying back expensive leather—an economic cycle the editor calls 'almost criminal.'
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.
The Dakota, on her recent departure, took hence 444 green hides and 30 bundles of skins, and every ten days for eight years she or the other steamer in the same line has taken from 150 to 500 hides and an enormous quantity of skins. These hides and skins are sent away for tanning and preparation for market, and many of them—perhaps as many as are sent away—are returned after tanning and preparation. Thus our people foster and sustain industries in California at enormous expense, and in so doing deprive themselves of their own means of subsistence to a degree almost criminal. The 60,000 people of Western Washington easily enough eat the meat of 1,500 beeves and 9,000 sheep a month. The tanning of these hides and skins alone is sufficient to keep going a large establishment. These hides, on the contrary, are shipped below, and, after being made into leather, are sent back. Some fifteen or twenty charges and profits are tacked on by this forward and backward movement, which would be saved here, and which add not a little to the expense of even an ordinary pair of boots.
“Our people foster and sustain industries in California at enormous expense, and in so doing deprive themselves of their own means of subsistence to a degree almost criminal.”
This 1883 editorial reflects the persistent regional anxiety about being a 'resource colony' for larger states like California. The argument that Seattle should process its own raw materials remains a common theme in Washington's economic development discourse.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.