Why is the Seattle Mail Missing?
As the Northern Pacific Railway connects the Pacific Northwest, residents are fuming over persistent postal failures.
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.
It is nothing new to the dwellers on Puget Sound to hear that our mail service is wretchedly poor. So long as our section of the country was isolated, people were compelled to put up with this state of affairs, but now that the Northern Pacific Railway gives us rapid communication with the commercial centers of the country, we have a right to demand and insist upon a better service. It has been ten days since any Eastern mail has been received at Seattle. This was, of course, in part due to the blockading of the Northern Pacific. Trains, however, succeeded in reaching Portland as long ago as Thursday last, bearing mails, yet not an ounce of this mail has yet been handed to the people of Seattle. There has been either the most shameful neglect in this matter, or an utter indifference to the needs of the people of Western Washington. In either case, somebody should be 'bounced' from the service.
“The people of this section are now too numerous and too powerful to be trifled with by indifferent postal officials.”
Infrastructure anxiety in Seattle is as old as the city itself. Just as residents in 1884 felt ignored by federal mail systems despite new rail connections, modern Seattleites often feel that their growing city’s infrastructure struggles to catch up to the pace of its economic expansion.
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