While Seattle Chased Klondike Gold, Portland Quietly Bought the Farm

While the cities of the Sound have good reason to feel jubilant over the remarkable stimulus that has been awakened by the Alaska mining excitement, it is to be deplored that the proper value of the trade of the great agricultural districts is not meeting with the recognition it deserves. Seattle is clapping her hands with glee over her mastery of the Klondike outfitting business, and poking all sorts of fun at Portland for allowing herself to be left so far behind in the race. But from reports received from correspondents in the great grain and stock districts of the basin of the Columbia and Snake rivers and their tributaries, Portland is pursuing an exceptionally active fall and winter canvass for trade of a different sort. That city has had for a number of days a specially chartered train full of members of its leading jobbing and mercantile houses traveling throughout Idaho, Eastern Oregon and Washington. Something of what this trainload of rustling representatives has been doing has appeared in our daily papers, but it has excited scarcely a murmur in our city, where every one is dreaming of the great harvest to be reaped from the tide of speculative humanity that will sweep through in the spring for the land of the midnight sun. Portland is said to have moss on her back and to be in a continual state of lethargy. It is not true. Portland is a city of banks, and one of the richest of her size in the Union. What has made her so? No Klondike has spurred her in a day from a hamlet to a metropolis. Her strength and her wealth are in the vast commercial relations she has built up with the immense country behind her. One half of the state of Washington pays tribute to her. She comes into the districts that, by the law of the map, are fair territory first for the cities of Puget Sound, secures the handling of the productions of our ranches and our ranges, and gives them in exchange her merchandise, her clothing, her manufactures, without scarcely a challenge being heard. Portland can afford to forget Klondike if she can monopolize the agricultural trade of Eastern Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana, to say nothing of other tributary states. At a low estimate there is $150,000,000 in it for Portland. All money utilized in handling the products of a country passes like the ebb and flow of a tide through its leading commercial center. This money swings in and out and is part of a healthy circulation. We are not decrying the creditable and highly successful efforts of the Seattle merchants to control the Alaska business. Out of the Klondike there has come not to exceed $4,000,000. That is a large sum, to be sure. But of the larger part of that we have seen only a shimmer, as it went hurriedly through to the great centers of the East and the Old World. Perhaps $15,000,000 has been spent by those going in this season. The expenditure of this amount has been principally in Seattle, and the prospects are that there will be a glorious increase next year. It will make things boom, and there will be plenty of money floating around for everybody. Good prices will rule. But, we repeat, Portland is not going to dry up and blow away because she will not do the lion's share of the Alaska outfitting. That $150,000,000 will enable her to continue to drag along for a while yet.