The Day the Pigs Needed Life Jackets: Seattle’s Great Duwamish Flood of 1876
As the Duwamish River swells and farmers flee to their attics, local merchants rally to clear the Skagit River, betting on a waterway that could transform the territory's economy.
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.
UNDER WATER.—The young people along the Duwamish are about as near submerged as folks often get to be. Capt. W. H. Taylor, of the Seattle Coal and Transportation Company, went up on the Otter yesterday and reports a state of affairs like the Sacramento Valley in 1861. Farmers are moving into the upper stories of their houses and the pigs are squealing for life-preservers. Chickens roost in the tallest fir-trees and keep a bottle-cork under each wing. Fences have "stood not upon the order of going," but flew off with ease. The great piles of drift that have come down indicate a big rise and a great destruction of farm improvements.
The Comet went out at 6 A.M. yesterday with a number of passengers, several of whom were ladies, and after bucking against the current for several hours, was obliged to return to port.
CHANGE OF MAIL.—The Snohomish mail is now carried by the steamer Nellie, Captain J. S. Hill having relinquished it in favor of Capt. Wright. The Fanny Lake will devote her attention to the Skagit and Stillaguamish trade, which she will find more profitable than running in opposition.
THE SKAGIT RIVER.—W. B. Moore and Charles McDonald are in the city, to procure subscriptions of cash, tools and provisions, for aiding in the removal of obstruction to the upper jam of the Skagit river. The importance of this movement to our business men, cannot readily be over-estimated. We are the nearest large emporium to that river which, when once opened, will admit of navigation by boats as large as the Annie Stewart and Yakima for sixty miles and by lighter ones, for thirty miles further. Its valley will support at least three thousand families by logging, agriculture, and stock raising and that trade is worth propitiating. Moore and McDonald went over to Port Blakely yesterday, and Captain Benton, who is always wide awake to the chance of securing good timber for his mills, headed the list with one hundred dollars.
Those of our merchants who do not feel like handing out cash in these hard times, can pay their subscriptions in goods, such as axes, boots clothing; and their donations will be very acceptable. This means something more than mere play over the experiment of opening a mud creek. It is the developing of a larger and bolder stream than any on the coast save the Columbia, Willamette and Sacramento. We say help it liberally.
This 1876 account captures Seattle's precarious relationship with its geography: simultaneously threatened by the flooding Duwamish River that isolates neighborhoods, and dependent on the development of waterways like the Skagit for economic survival. Today, as climate change intensifies flood risks in the Pacific Northwest, the tension between infrastructure development and environmental resilience remains just as critical for Seattle's future.
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