The Trail That Wasn't: How Bellingham Bay Boosters Sold a Gold-Rush Route
A Steilacoom editor accuses Whatcom land speculators of luring miners and immigrants with false reports that the Bellingham Bay trail to the gold fields was nearly finished.
Not content with having practiced the deception above alluded to with the 'Trail from Bellingham Bay' for months, and inflicted serious injury not only upon the multitudes who have gone there from San Francisco, but upon Washington Territory at large, the land speculators at Whatcom still continue their attempts to delude the unwary and ignorant into stopping there with stories of the trail being near its completion, or quite finished. We give the following as a sample, and caution the public to judge for themselves how much credit to place in such reports.
We give them here the benefit of publication in full:
June 17th, 1858. Dear Sir: I have to say Mr. Quigley has returned below now, and you can hear his report. That route won't do. I was up the river yesterday, marked on the map 'to be examined,' and though it had no sight to the Brigade Trail, it is impossible for a trail. I have been in the mountains this high [season] ... Don't despair; don't ... [the remainder of the letter is damaged in the original scan].
“That route won't do... It is impossible for a trail.”
Bellingham Bay's boosters understood a basic rule of the boom economy: sell the route before it exists. The same pattern—hype, speculative lots and disappointed newcomers—has recurred in Washington real estate from the railroad era to today's housing crunches.
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