The Promised City of the Desert
Promoters in 1889 pitched Pasco as the inevitable 'Gate City' of the Inland Empire, promising a metropolis at the confluence of the Snake and Columbia Rivers.
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.
Some day a large city will grow up at the junction of the Snake and Columbia Rivers, at Pasco. The climate conditions of Pasco and of Franklin County, of which it is the county seat, are unexcelled for health, comfort and the products of the soil, nearing the semi-tropical. The magnificent location and natural site for a large commercial and distributing city has induced wealthy bankers, capitalists, and shrewd real estate men to form a stock company, with a paid-up capital of $500,000, for the purpose of building up a city where nature designed one to be. There is not a spot on the map of the whole of North America where another such a junction of large navigable rivers meet. As a water transportation center, Pasco rivals St. Louis, Missouri. As a railroad center, it is already the point from which the Northern Pacific radiates east, north and south. The Union Pacific survey of a road from Pasco to Lewiston along the Snake River has been completed. The Pasco, Portland & Pacific Company on the north side of the Columbia River survey is finished, and estimates of the cost of construction are now made. Other enterprises are being formulated into shape, such as the First National Bank, the Grand Hotel Company, and the Pasco Lumber and Manufacturing Company.
“There is not a spot on the map of the whole of North America where another such a junction of large navigable rivers meet.”
This 1889 advertisement reflects the turn-of-the-century boosterism that defined Washington’s rapid development. While Pasco never became the 'St. Louis of the West,' it evolved into a crucial hub of the Tri-Cities, mirroring how modern tech-driven growth continues to shape the identity of Eastern Washington's desert landscape.
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