The Unawakened Giant: Why Washington Territory Is the Next California

THE UNDEVELOPED EMPIRE

In the development of new countries it has always been found that population and accumulations along the shores and the lines of broad, traversable rivers, whilst opulently rich regions inland have long remained an unknown wilderness. The reason for this result is the influence of commerce and facilities of open settlement. But with the advent of the railroad a new factor entered into this problem of material development. The railroad in the United States has not only supplemented the venerable modes of communication of olden times, but has practically dried up in part the great rivers as avenues of business and turned the axial channels of trade from a north and south to an east and west line of direction.

Washington Territory is naturally the finest maritime district in the world in its possession of Puget Sound with its arms, but singularly enough, on account of the great bar across the mouth of the Columbia, and the Cascades in its course, the largest and richest portion of the Territory which is embraced in the valley of that river, is an inland basin and requires the delivery of a railroad to open it to settlement. In consequence of its isolation it is comparatively a blank.

There are few persons who have any knowledge or idea of its wonderful agricultural capabilities and other resources. Being a dry country, like California, it has been regarded by casual visitors as a kind of a barren wilderness. So California for the matter of that in all seriousness was written down by all its early explorers as a desert and incapable of agricultural occupation. Yet the presence of man and the reviving touch of water has wrought a glorious change there, and triumphantly proven the fallacy of the assumption.

So the same elements will do in our Eastern counties. Walla Walla already raises 1,000,000 bushels of wheat per annum for export, and the tenth of the valley is not yet in cultivation. And yet Walla Walla is only one of the many of those valleys. The Palouse country of Whitman County, which is just beginning to attract settlement, four hundred settlers having entered there this Summer [1876], is promised to possess even a larger area of grain land than all Walla Walla.

That is the great Yakima valley nearer home, with its broad central plain of Kittitas and many side branches, as Naches, Wenatchee and Attisquim. Of this valley Gov. Stevens said in 1853, 'Great injustice has been done this region by gentlemen who have gone over it rapidly in the Summer and who have seen it but once. The whole valley of the Yakima and its tributaries which have been denominated a sage plain and a desert is rich and productive.'

The three valleys are beginning to rise into prominence now, because the advance guard of civilization has reached them and is making them known to the world. But they only constitute a rim of the Territory along the Southern border. North of Walla Walla and Whitman lie the richer valleys of Spokane and Colville and north of Yakima are the Wenatches, Methow Chelan and Okanagan.

In regard to their capabilities we have emphatic and reliable accounts in the reports of the early government surveys. Gov. Stevens 'The country north of the Spokane river between the Columbia and Kootenay, and the Coeur d'Alene mountains is fertile and well timbered. The country about Colville and Clark Fork is rich in minerals. The valley of Okanagan fine, well grassed, wooded and arable.'

Again, he states, 'Washington Territory east of the spines abundant forests. On the immediate bank of the Columbia the country is not promising, but going back a little further, the grazing is luxuriant and excellent, and the soil rich particularly on the river valley.'

We might add similar testimony to the most voluminous state in regard to this great undeveloped empire which remains to be penetrated and built up from this sea port; but will conclude with an extract from a speech delivered on Congress by Senator Casserly, of California, on the Northern Pacific land grant, as follow: 'An empire in itself. I beg gentlemen to observe more than this, is the very richest percentage which any railroad company has been fortunate enough to obtain. It contains more good land than any other large miscellaneous tract except the grant to the Union Central Railroad.'

When these fertile districts of our Territorial domain are brought into intimate communication by continuous lines of settlement and civilization, as they will be, Washington Territory will rank with any of the States in the constellation of the Union, and her metropolis will command a commerce that will truly imperial in extent.