The Great Land Grab of 1878: A Territorial Tug-of-War
While D.C. legislators bickered over the Northern Pacific Railroad's land grants and portage routes, Washington Territory settlers fought to secure their homestead rights against corporate expansion.
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 bill allowing eight years additional time for completion of the main line of the Northern Pacific Railroad to Portland and Kalama was adopted by the Senate railroad committee. The company is required within nine months to commence at the mouth of the Snake River and build eastwardly on the south side of the Columbia River twenty-five miles of road the first year, and at least forty miles annually afterward. The bill surrenders to the Government about 7,000,000 acres of land, heretofore reserved for the abandoned branch across the Cascade Mountains, and provides for a grant of precisely the same number of acres to the Portland, Salt Lake and South Pass Railroad Company. Provisions regarding the protection of settlers' rights ensure that homestead settlers may take one hundred and sixty instead of eighty acres, to which they were previously limited within the railroad grant. All lands in odd-numbered sections are to be sold by the Government to actual pre-emption settlers at one dollar and a quarter per acre, until the adjacent five-mile section of the road is completed, whereupon the Government is to pay the company the proceeds of lands already sold.
“It is reasonable and just, and the rights of all persons under this act may be enforced by judicial proceedings in any court of competent jurisdiction.”
This 1878 struggle over the Northern Pacific Railroad highlights the foundational conflict in Washington’s history: the tension between large-scale corporate infrastructure development and the rights of individual homesteaders. Just as our modern housing debates center on who owns the land and who dictates its usage, this bill reveals that even 150 years ago, Washingtonians were battling to ensure that public land remained accessible to actual settlers rather than just railroad monopolies.
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