The Great Dakota Exodus: 100 Settlers Arrive in Seattle
As the rest of the country heads west, a steady stream of homesteaders from the plains is turning north to the Puget Sound, bringing new life to the young city.
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 BENEFIT.
It was duly published yesterday that it appears that the splendid steamship Dakotah of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, now on her way up the Sound, is bringing one hundred and one passengers who were looked prior to the sending the list. Of these all but twenty-six are for the Sound, and sixty-five nearly two-thirds of the entire number are for Seattle.
Many of them, as we have learned, are home seekers from the desolated fields of Dakota, Kansas and Nebraska. This is not a bad showing in view of the fact that the drift of travel this centennial year is rather from than toward our country, and considering also the recent change for the better in the vessels on the San Francisco and Portland competing line.
The establishment of this line sometime last year, affording expeditious, regular and comfortable access to our city and Territory from the western terminus of the transcontinental railroad in California, is of such magnitude as to be entitled to our emphatic sanction and support. As a feeder to our population and prosperity its importance can hardly be over-estimated.
To be enabled to remove from San Francisco by a line that makes regularly three trips a month is certainly the next best thing to a through railroad. Its regularity is largely humored the tide of travel that reaches us from California instead of going around Cape Horn.
In 1878, Seattle was fighting for relevance against Portland and San Francisco, relying on steamship connections to survive. Today, the city faces a similar struggle with housing affordability and infrastructure, where access to transportation remains the primary driver of real estate value and community growth. The 'desolated fields' of the Dakotas mirror the modern migration of remote workers seeking affordable living spaces in the Pacific Northwest.
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