The audacious railroad land grab that made Seattle's delegate a target
Facing attacks from the Tacoma Herald, Judge Orange Jacobs is praised for blocking a Northern Pacific claim to 783,600 acres — land the railroad tried to take for building just 31 miles of a 'branch road' to a coal mine.
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.
A Washington correspondent of the Tacoma Herald pays the highest tribute to the fidelity and efficiency of our Delegate in Congress, in bitterly, almost frantically assailing his action... He is setting up opposition to the extension of time to construct and complete the Northern Pacific Railroad. He is laboring in the Department of the Interior to prevent the Company from getting the lands it has earned by constructing thirty-one miles of its branch road from Tacoma to Wilkeson... The claim put in for lands it has earned by constructing 31 miles of its branch road from Tacoma to Wilkeson, is the most audacious attempt to swindle ever devised. Any one who will take the trouble to look at the map upon which this pretended 'branch road' is marked, will see that it is not on the main line or branch of any railroad contemplated by the land grant, and that the attempt to recover from the Government 783,600 acres of land, valued at $1,958,000, which would pay for the construction and leave a balance of $850,000, to construct a private road to a coal mine, is a fraud and swindle of the first magnitude... All honor to Judge Jacobs! faithful to his trusts as the people's representative amid the rule of venality and corruption.
“The claim put in for lands it has earned by constructing 31 miles of its branch road from Tacoma to Wilkeson, is the most audacious attempt to swindle ever devised.”
The fight over whether a railroad could claim 783,600 acres of public land for a 31-mile spur to a coal mine reads like a 19th-century version of modern fights over corporate subsidies and giveaway land deals — a delegate in office standing against a powerful monopoly, and the interests' press turning on him for it.
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