The Railroad Raises Its Rates, and the Northwest Howls
Spokane Falls merchants protest a Northern Pacific freight hike that makes shipping from Minneapolis cost as much as shipping from New York — and warn the railroad it is strangling its own territory.
The recent advance in freight rates to Northwest points by the Northern Pacific Railroad Company gives some very unpleasant information to the business men of Spokane Falls and other towns of that region. There can be no doubt of the serious character of the situation to the business of the places named, and of the decided hardship it puts upon the wholesale merchants and manufacturers of Minneapolis and St. Paul. An advance of the freight rates between Minneapolis and Spokane Falls to a figure exactly equal to the rate between New York and Spokane is at once an absurdity and an injustice, concerning which there can be only astonishment and emphatic protest on the part of the entire Northwest. It is not easily understood how the Northern Pacific Company could have thought it to its own interest to attempt the establishment of this exorbitant rate against the very territory through which its lines are built and upon which it must depend for its business. The cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul are certainly considerable elements in the development of the Northern Pacific system. New York City cannot develop the Northwest, nor can she furnish with the promptness desired the supplies needed in the prosecution of that great work. That trade, or the bulk of it at least, belongs to Minneapolis, and its natural tendency in this direction is well illustrated by statements of certain wholesalers and manufacturers who state that their business from the further Northwestern Territories in January, February and the first half of March of this year has been for these months respectively 50, 70 and 90 per cent greater than it was for the same months of 1883. Such a state of affairs must also bring its disadvantages and its losses to the Northern Pacific road itself and secure for it the ill will of a very large business community which ought to be and wants to be its constituent and its friend. The wrong should be reconsidered and remedied — and that, too, at the very earliest possible date.
“An advance of the freight rates between Minneapolis and Spokane Falls to a figure exactly equal to the rate between New York and Spokane is at once an absurdity and an injustice.”
The Northern Pacific was the monopoly that made Spokane, and its rate-setting power was the original 'who owns the ground under both' fight. Freight-rate protests like this one fed the Populist and Granger movements that eventually produced railroad regulation — a template for every modern fight over who controls the cost of moving goods.
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