The Northern Pacific's 'Remarkable' Ghost Stories
When the Northern Pacific Railroad tried to claim public land, their dubious land-grant 'discoveries' sparked a week of local outrage that exposed corporate greed.
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.
The manner in which the railroad press attempts to find an explanation for the hostile acts of the land department bearing upon railroad land grants is as remarkable as it is disingenuous. One of them claims that it was done with the variants and at the instigation of the Northern Pacific Company itself; another that it is a sinister fountain of policy mapped out by Mr. Armstrong while he was an individual in the Department at Washington; a third that there is nothing in it, that it is all a reputation cold and drawing of a toy letter; and still further when one of the papers announces a revolution of this kind, the tornadoes are on, and for a week they howl in unison about the territory, only to learn finally that there was neither sense nor truth in their wonderful discovery. The same delectable sheets cry out at the treeless state of every supposed victory of the company over the people, and rejoice in the most shameful manner at the plundering of the people by their masters, the company. It is a rarely pleasant thing in the people to have a stop come to the long career of oppression they have experienced at the hands of these corporations, and a proper share of the credit therefore will be bestowed upon the people and the Secretary of the Interior, despite the falsehoods of the railroad organs.
“The same delectable sheets cry out at the treeless state of every supposed victory of the company over the people, and rejoice in the most shameful manner at the plundering of the people by their masters.”
This 1885 editorial captures the early tension between corporate railroad expansion and the public, an echo of today's debates regarding public land use and the outsized influence of large entities on local resources. The 'howling' press and corporate misinformation campaigns feel startlingly familiar to modern readers navigating a crowded media landscape.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.