The Great Railway Rush
Speculators and boosters bet big on a massive new rail expansion connecting the Yakima Valley to the Cascade coal fields.
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.
North Yakima and the Yakima country is attracting much attention at present and everything is favorable for a year of great prosperity. Work has been begun on a vast system of irrigation ditches which will require the expenditure of a million and a half dollars, and the probability of railroad construction in this section was never more favorable. The filing of the blanket mortgage of the United Railroad company in this county indicates that the Northern Pacific, through its auxiliary company, proposes building the much talked of road from North Yakima to South Bend. Now comes the Stanley, Cascade & Eastern Railroad company, a recently organized corporation with a capitalization of $5,000,000, whose object is to build from Stanley, Pacific county, to North Yakima via the Cowlitz pass, tapping the magnificent beds of anthracite which exist in the pass. Closely allied to this company is a construction company, capital $2,500,000, of which senators W. H. Stewart and John Paul Jones of Nevada are the leading figures. A large corps of engineers under R. J. Laws are en route from Nevada and will commence surveying the route at once.
“Jay Gould has said that railroad building in the west must come to a halt, in order to allow the country to catch up, but Mr. Gould has never visited the great state of Washington.”
In the 1890s, the dream of becoming a 'railway hub' drove massive speculative capital into Yakima. Today, the geography of the valley is still defined by the corridors carved out by these early industrial giants, though the focus has shifted from anthracite coal to the massive logistics and distribution networks that still rely on those same regional rail lines.
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