The Promised Land of Puget Sound
An 1876 editorial from Seattle’s 'Intelligencer' pitches the Pacific Northwest as a hardship-free utopia for those fleeing the failures of the East.
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.
Among the many notable new departures that have distinguished the history of Seattle in this Centennial year about to close, is the institution of a monthly journal devoted to the interests of agriculture, immigration, and education. We cannot better give an idea of the tone and scope of this new journal than by the following extract from an article headed 'Why Come to the Puget Sound Country?'
Owing to natural causes, times have been growing harder for the poor man for the last three or four years, until there is a general feeling of unrest pervading the greater portion of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains. The mechanic, the small farmer, and the young man are all casting about for a country where life will not be a burden. Surely the Eastern States will not do, for the depression of manufacturing offers a poor field for labor. He turns to the great Northwest, and finds the 'Garden of the World' (the Midwest) suffering from hailstorms, drouths, water spouts, rust, weevil, chinch-bugs, potato-bugs, and that most destructive of modern plagues, the grasshopper.
What can the Puget Sound country offer? One hundred and sixty acres of land at government price, where not one of the above enumerated evils exists to a sufficient extent to be a hardship. A climate with but two seasons, a wet and a dry; where clover grows the year round, and some of the hardier flowers are in bloom as late as Christmas. Where labor has coin value in the mines, in the logging camps, and in the saw mills, and no failure in the crops. Where one can buy a home cheap, or take it as the gift of the government, and split fine, long boards from the tall cedars, and build a comfortable house with no money outlay except for nails.
“Where one can buy a home cheap, or take it as the gift of the government, and split fine, long boards from the tall cedars, and build a comfortable house with no money outlay except for nails.”
This 1876 promotional copy echoes modern-day real estate marketing, positioning the Pacific Northwest as a climate refuge and a land of 'untapped' potential. While the author ignores the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, their desperate pitch to 'Easterners' struggling with economic depression feels hauntingly familiar to anyone following the region's cycles of migration and housing growth.
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