The Struggle for an Infrastructure of Our Own
An 1876 editorial reflects on the frustration of relying on federal aid to build the Pacific Northwest, urging locals to fund their own railroads and commercial infrastructure instead.
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.
If the opening of the Columbia River for through-steamboat navigation ever is to be done, it is most likely that it will have to be by government aid, and depending upon that it may be long years before carried to completion. River improvements here are serviceable in their way as pleas for appropriation drafts on the Treasury to be worked through by political influence and divided by jobbers. Western Washington has never been able to get any appropriations of this kind. Our government is too wide in its scope, too elaborate and cumbrous in its machinery, and too democratic in its make-up to be able to prosecute local projects with either economy or dispatch. If the people in Eastern Oregon and Washington wait for this extraneous and uncertain aid from the government, their hopes of a truly commercial outlet are probably doomed to indefinite postponement. The line that the people themselves unite upon is the one that will carry the trade. When the people undertake work with the will to put it through, their purpose cannot be turned nor their advance be stopped until success is theirs. Now seems the most opportune time that fortune has thrown in our way for hurrying forward our trans-Territorial railroad, uniting its agricultural heart with its central seaport. The grand adoption at the present time of more economical systems of building, and the unusually low price of iron and other materials as well as of labor, are remittents that favor the continuous prosecution of the work with all practical rapidity.
“The line that the people themselves unite upon is the one that will carry the trade. When the people undertake work with the will to put it through, their purpose cannot be turned.”
This 1876 editorial reads like a modern-day frustration with Seattle's regional transit and infrastructure delays. The tension between waiting for federal/state funding and the desire for local, autonomous control over vital logistics remains a core thread in the story of Pacific Northwest growth.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.