The Struggle to Count Seattle
Boosterism and bureaucracy collide as city leaders argue that the recent census failed to capture Seattle’s true, booming population.
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.
With the press of other matters of the Territory we must have our little growl at the recently completed census. Good work cannot be obtained without good pay; the pay for taking the census was entirely inadequate, and the work was slighted in consequence. It was taken at the time of assessment, and by the same officers, the assessment being the more important duty. Still, the result is not materially out of the way. It is not enough to estimate the floating population; they should be regularly entered on the books. Including the thousand or fifteen hundred transient residents of the city, and including the thousand or more persons living around the edge of Lake Union—beyond the city limits, but just as much in town as those dwelling on Mill Street—Seattle's inhabitants would be found to number over eight thousand. This is a gain of a little over 100 per cent in two years, a gain which in other parts of the country would be looked upon as immense.
“This is a gain of a little over 100 per cent in two years, a gain which in other parts of the country would be looked upon as immense.”
The perpetual tension between 'official' headcounts and the reality of a rapidly transient, growing city remains a central theme in Seattle's civic identity. Much like today’s debates over census undercounts and the definition of 'official' population, the 1883 editorial reflects a city obsessed with proving its own importance through data.
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