Whose Land Is It? Seattle Takes On the Northern Pacific Railroad

The President of a great railroad institution honored our city with a visit yesterday. He came over the 'orphan road' and was received by a deputation of our prominent citizens. He visited our Chamber of Commerce and replied to some interrogatories; his reply is published elsewhere. He gravely told the twenty or thirty men of the body supposed to be the business interests of this city that the Northern Pacific Railroad Company was making strides from this city of the most important and enormous kind. He blamed them for placing obstacles in the way of the incalculable effort of his company by advocating forfeiture of its assumed lands.

He said that his company needed the lands as collateral on which to borrow money to build a railroad — lands subjected to private ownership and to be used to injure us. He gravely assured the assembled men that they were at liberty to build a railroad to Green River if they were able and desired, and that in time, when his company had constructed a road over the mountains, this road built by our citizens might intersect with the Cascade branch. He told them, moreover, that provided the company could borrow money on government collateral — that is, public lands to which it has no legal or equitable claim — it would build twenty-five miles or more of the Cascade branch within the year, and show Congress that it was in good faith carrying out its contract to speedily complete its railroad.

Well, if the members of the Chamber of Commerce have read the Post-Intelligencer for the past months they have been assured of all these things before. We have urged that in sheer self-preservation it was the duty of this people to oppose this attack upon the city of Seattle, upon its prosperity, upon its rights as a self-built city.

Mr. Harris tells us that these lands are public, that we have no more right or interest in them than the people of the East. It is not so. They are situated in this Territory; they adjoin lands occupied by our citizens, who pay taxes on every acre they own and upon all the improvements they make, and who are expected and required by law to protect and defend the rights of this huge corporation at the peril of their lives if necessary. They belong to a part of the public domain set apart for a future State, of which the Congress of the United States, the Government itself, is trustee; they belong to the intending immigrant, the man who comes over here to aid in creating and supporting a future State.