The Smoke That Choked Seattle
A Seattle timber investor returns from the Puget Sound to find the region shrouded in disaster as forest fires consume the landscape.
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.
Waiter Shoemaker is back from his trip to Yellowstone Park and Puget Sound. While on Puget Sound, the forest fires were sweeping over vast areas and shrouding the whole country in smoke. Seattle looks like destruction, but is building up rapidly. Mr. Shoemaker had thought of buying timber land on the Sound, but the sight of the fires discouraged him. He says green fir trees will burn like tinder. He saw a green tree of that species near Whatcom burned half down by loggers having an augur hole bored through it, with an upward slant on one side, so as to create an air draft, and stuffed with kindling. The interior of the tree being thus ignited, the trunk burned like a torch. That struck Mr. Shoemaker as decidedly against timber as a permanent investment. He thinks that since numerous settlers have recently gone into the Sound region and are clearing the land, the liability of fires has greatly increased, and will continue to do so in ratio with the progress of settlement.
“He says green fir trees will burn like tinder.”
The 1889 fire season, coming shortly after the Great Seattle Fire, highlights a long history of fire ecology and land management challenges in the Pacific Northwest. Today, Seattle’s climate-anxiety mirrors this 19th-century unease as wildfire smoke has transformed from an occasional seasonal nuisance into an annual civic crisis.
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