Skeptics Question the 'Boom' in Tacoma
A blistering critique of the 'Tacoma Ledger' and its persistent, unsubstantiated claims regarding the city's industrial future.
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.
The Tacoma Ledger has been talking pretty loud during the past week of the big shops the Northern Pacific Company were about to build on the mud flats opposite that city, disregarding the known rope-lashed condition of the company and its inability to do more than barely keep going. The Ledger has spread a great number of stories of the wonderful things to be done at and near Tacoma, if a tithe of which had been realized, the town would have a hundred thousand inhabitants. Between its harbor improvements, its grain elevators, its five million dollar iron works, its ship yards and factories, its canal trade, its Cascade division and switchback, and a host of other gigantic enterprises now dead and buried, that paper has given its local readers many a business boom, who, however, must be sadly discouraged at the multitude of failures, and who must have lost a mountain of faith in the reliability of the Ledger’s wires.
“Between its... gigantic enterprises now dead and buried, that paper has given its local readers many a business boom.”
Boosterism and 'vaporware' projects have long defined the Pacific Northwest's growth cycles. This report from 1886 shows that Seattle’s historical rivalry with Tacoma was fueled as much by disparaging the other city's economic news as it was by direct commercial competition.
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