The Fight Against Washington’s Land Barons
An 1877 editorial warns that unchecked land speculation in the Washington Territory is turning away settlers and creating a class of 'land fiends' who gobble up public resources.
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.
When in the near future the Territory of Washington shall have risen to the proud dignity of statehood, there will be many matters of importance to consider in the forming of a constitution. Chief among these things, in our opinion, is the engrafting in the State constitution of a restrictive clause declaring the number of acres of unoccupied State lands beyond which a person shall not become possessed, or the establishing of a reasonable, graduated tax on land, or some other and better plan to guard against the system of wholesale land grabbing which for so many years has cursed the State of California. In a Territory like this, where there is such an immense area of Government land, the opportunities offered for this species of swindling are particularly good, whereby some of the best and most available sections of the country are gobbled and held by a few insatiate land fiends to the detriment of the intending settler, driving away from us a most desirable class of population, and working an irreparable injury to the country—to say nothing of the manifest injustice of licensing such selfish persons as land grabbers necessarily are, to rob their fellow citizens of the privileges of preempting or homesteading public land, as guaranteed them by the laws of the United States.
“The opportunities offered for this species of swindling are particularly good, whereby some of the best and most available sections of the country are gobbled and held by a few insatiate land fiends to the detriment of the intending settler.”
This 1877 editorial highlights a recurring theme in Pacific Northwest history: the tension between small-scale settlers seeking homesteads and wealthy speculators holding land for profit. The language of 'land fiends' and the concern over 'wholesale land grabbing' mirrors modern debates in Seattle and the surrounding region regarding corporate land ownership, housing affordability, and the displacement of residents by speculative market forces.
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