A Seattle emissary fights to save public land from a rail giant
When the Northern Pacific Railroad tried to claim 40,000 acres of coal-rich land, a local citizen traveled to D.C. to stop the 'steal.'
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 editorial correspondent of the Sunday paper writes from Washington D.C. on May 4: On April 11th, the Public Lands Committee of the House reported a bill for forfeiting all land not earned by the Northern Pacific Railroad by July 4, 1879. This would reclaim for the people forty million acres of land. Yet the company, recognizing they are not entitled to the land, sought a scheme to steal it. In 1877, the Northern Pacific built a local railroad from Tacoma Junction to the Carbonado coal mines. Not being part of the main line for which Congress granted land, they never asked the government to accept it. After the committee report, they determined to pretend this was their main line to steal 40,000 acres of coal lands. When this was announced, the people of the Territory became aroused. They sent Mr. W. H. White of Seattle to tell Congress the truth. Mr. White is here and went to the Public Lands Committee, and he put to rout all the land sharks. If push and energy can defeat the robbery, Mr. White will succeed, for he has the will and ability to show the matter up in its true light.
“They recognized the justness, yet not honest enough to acknowledge the point, they look around for a scheme to—well, steal is the plain old Saxon term.”
This 1884 report captures the era's intense distrust of corporate land monopolies in the Pacific Northwest. W. H. White’s efforts to defend public land against the Northern Pacific prefigure the long-standing Washington tension between civic control and the massive, state-subsidized influence of rail and resource corporations.
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