The $5.5 Million Bet That Would Reshape Seattle's Waterfront

The announcement that the $5,500,000 for the filling in of the tide flats and the excavation of the waterways and the south canal to connect the Sound with Lake Washington had been secured was followed up yesterday by the positive statement that all the papers in the matter had been signed in St. Louis. This welcome news was brought by Hon. Eugene Semple, the president, and Julius F. Hale, the counsel, of the Seattle Lake Washington Waterway Company, which has the contract for the work from the state, on their return from St. Louis yesterday. In an interview with a Post-Intelligencer reporter, they said:

"We are greatly pleased with the result of our mission, for all the papers that were to be signed when our treasurer and coworker, David E. Durie, left St. Louis have been signed and the errors finally closed. There is no use in going over the ground that Mr. Durie has covered in his interview so well, and all we have to say is that the money is ready to fill in the tide flats and excavate the Duwamish waterways and will be ready for the lake canal and locks as soon as the right-of-way and subsidy are secured. We are very much gratified with the success so far achieved and are sure that the canal will be built.

"The fact that Seattle pulled through the recent financial storm without a single bank failure was a tower of strength to us in St. Louis. They said Seattle and St. Louis were the only two cities in the West that went through that trying ordeal without a single bank failure. The St. Louis financiers would not have considered the proposition were it not for the canal feature. They recognized the fact that the canal would give this city a splendid and unequaled fresh water harbor, and conceded that this would in time make it the leading city of the Pacific coast, and hence they took kindly to the scheme.

"This arrangement to raise the $5,500,000 in St. Louis will give Seattle a connection with a wealthy and conservative city that cannot help but be beneficial. St. Louis is making wonderful strides under the influence of the tributary country, the new South and the new Southwest.

"When we first went to St. Louis and unfolded our canal scheme they said that we had come to the wrong place, that the conservative, steady people of St. Louis would not invest in a wildcat scheme. We told them that we had come from a reliable town with a conservative and a reliable scheme and one that would be sure to interest them, and before we got through with them they were full of interest, as is testified to by the fact that they will put up their millions to dig this waterway."

Messrs. Semple and Hale came home over the Burlington, the new route recently opened between Seattle and St. Louis. They made the trip in six hours less than four days, notwithstanding the fact that they were delayed for six hours at St. Joseph. Next Sunday the Burlington will put into effect a schedule that will reduce the time between St. Louis and Seattle to three and a half days. This connects Seattle closer to St. Louis than any other Eastern metropolis and by a railroad which shows its friendship by advertising Seattle extensively in its folders.