Building a City on Sagebrush and Ambition

Eighteen hundred and eighty-nine has gone into the past, freighted with the successes and failures of a twelve-month record. Twelve months ago, our citizens, seeing the need for better hotel facilities, voluntarily subsidized them to supply this want, and as a result, we have two of the largest and best-furnished brick hotels in the state. Our city fathers quit emulating Rip Van Winkle and built miles of sidewalk, cut thousands of shade trees, constructed huge cisterns for fire purposes, and purchased one of the best steam fire engines that money could buy. At the close of the summer, North Yakima took a hand at politics and made a fight for the state capital that gave poor old Olympia such a shaking up that the old cedar shingles on her moss-grown houses have not ceased rattling yet. But better than all this is the earnest, energetic, public-spirited population of four thousand American men and women who intend to make North Yakima the leading city of central Washington and the state capital. We believe in the 'cast your bread upon the water' promise; we give to everything, and liberally, from a church to a wagon road, and there is not a citizen of the place but who can truthfully say that he has made money by giving to these public enterprises.