The Tide Flat Grabbers: Seattle’s Fight for Its Own Shoreline
As the statehood deadline looms, a fierce editorial battle erupts over who owns the valuable mudflats of Elliott Bay—speculators or the public?
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 efforts now being made under the law relating to oyster claims and by other technical pretexts to acquire title in the tide flats in the vicinity of Seattle are fraudulent. Neither those persons who are large owners with piles or who are 'planting' oyster beds, have any purpose to improve the property in any permanent and useful way and if they had it would make no difference so far as titles are concerned. The tide flats are the property of the government and when the territory becomes a state, will belong either to the state or the city whose commerce gives them value.
It seems to be the idea of lots of grabbers and speculators that because title to the flats is not vested in individuals, they are legitimate plunder open to the first comer; and no distinct pretense is deemed too flimsy to form a basis for a future claim. This idea has no basis in law or equity. Squatters have no more right or chance to acquire title in the flats than in the public school lands, the park tract east of the city, or in any public street.
Another common idea, only a little less absurd than the former, is that those who squat upon and make improvements upon tide lands will have the 'preference' in purchasing, presumably at the nominal price of public lands without reference to local position and special value. The impression seems to be that no distinction will be made between these flats, worth thousands of dollars per acre, and the lands upon the mountain tops which go begging at the nominal government price. Those who so believe must imagine that the settlement of property rights between the government and the future state will be negotiated by a committee of idiots, deaf and blind to the interests entrusted to them.
Any arrangement by which those who have made 'improvements' upon such lands would have special privileges in the matter of purchase, would imply an arrangement for the promotion of jobbery and robbery. When the lands are sold, if it shall be the policy of the state or city to sell them, it should be under a plan that will secure their full value, and there is not the slightest doubt that this will be done.
This 1889 editorial captures the existential anxiety of Seattle’s early years: who owns the land beneath the water? The fight against private speculators claiming public tidelands mirrors modern battles over waterfront development, public access to parks, and the commodification of urban space. Just as these editors feared 'jobbery and robbery,' today's citizens debate whether waterfront developments serve the public good or private profit.
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