The Myth of the Rain-Soaked Seattle Winter
An 1886 editorial blasts federal meteorologists for misrepresenting Puget Sound weather to the rest of the nation.
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.
If there is any concern of which the people of the Puget Sound country have a perfect and unquestionable right to complain in as loud a voice as they can command, it is the manner in which they are treated by the officials of the Signal Service. Of course, it is not that these worthy gentlemen have a desire to wreak harm upon our citizens. They may not through design, but through ignorance. They simply know nothing about Puget Sound weather, and they make a grievous mistake in persisting in the attempt to convince people that they do. If one should form his idea of the weather on Puget Sound entirely from reading the daily weather predictions of the Signal Service, he would naturally conclude that this was the rainiest country on the face of the earth and that its half-drowned inhabitants would regard such a phenomenon as a bright and clear day between the middle of October and the first of May as nothing less than the precursor of the crack of doom. What a libel these reports are, only one who has passed a winter on Puget Sound is qualified to say. What amount of injury they have done the country in the past cannot be told.
“They simply know nothing about Puget Sound weather, and they make a grievous mistake in persisting in the attempt to convince people that they do.”
More than 135 years later, the 'Seattle Freeze'—and the perception of perpetual gloom—remains a defining trope of the city's identity. This 1886 grievance shows that the battle over Seattle's reputation as a weather-beaten, damp outpost is as old as the city's integration into the national consciousness.
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