The Great 'Pulp' Boom of Seattle
While Seattle’s real estate developers were busy building the city, the local papers were fixated on an odd, failed experiment to tow a massive Canadian timber raft down the Pacific Coast to California—a project that ended in a floating, ocean-clogging disaster.
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.
Two men, named Knipe and Robinson, are trying to enlist Seattle capital in a project to take a log raft from Puget Sound to the California metropolis, where they propose to build a mill and employ cheap labor in construction. It will be remembered that several years ago, J.H. Moran constructed a great raft of logs on the Atlantic seaboard of Canada and attempted to tow it to New York. The raft parted and the logs floated about on the Atlantic for many months, seriously interfering with navigation and endangering the safety of vessels. Knipe and Robinson are currently trying to convince investors that they can succeed where Moran failed, promising that their project will be a great success, much as the removal of a cataract from an eye is pronounced a great success when the patient is not blinded.
“The raft parted and the logs floated about on the Atlantic for many months, seriously interfering with navigation and endangering the safety of vessels.”
The late 1880s was an era of unchecked, often quixotic speculation in Seattle, as city boosters vied to turn the wilderness into a metropolis. Today's tech-fueled real estate boom mirrors this Gilded Age obsession with 'big' ideas, where grandiose infrastructure promises often distract from the messy reality of the local housing market.
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