Railroad Monopoly Targets Seattle’s Prosperity

Gradually yet surely, the true inwardness of the present Northern Pacific management is being developed. The Northern Pacific Railroad Company was chartered to build a transcontinental railroad, not to act as a townsite speculator, lumber dealer, or coal company. Recognizing that the business of the Northern Pacific was railroading and not coal mining, that company contracted to sell certain coal lands near this city to the Oregon Improvement Company. It is now telegraphed from San Francisco that the Northern Pacific directors have adopted a resolution declining to sell these coal lands, upon the ground that it would pay better to lease them upon royalties. The principal place of business of the Oregon Improvement Company on Puget Sound is at Seattle. Here it has made heavy investments in docks, warehouses, and coal bunkers. It is alleged that C. B. Wright, a director and the largest individual stockholder of the Northern Pacific, is also a very large stockholder in the Tacoma Land Company. It is to the pecuniary interest of C. B. Wright and associates to boom Tacoma and sell town lots at high figures. To do this, they seem to think it necessary to crush out the old-established business of this city by discriminating against it. The Almighty, in surrounding this city with coal fields, timber, agricultural lands, and a magnificent bay, accomplished something which cannot be reversed by the puny hands of the Northern Pacific.