Pioneering the High Desert: An Early Settlement Dispatch from Yakima
A lifelong resident of Washington Territory recounts the struggles of farming near the Yakima River, the rapid expansion of homesteads toward the mountain summits, and the indignity of being denied the right to vote in one's own home.
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.
I have known the POST-INTELLIGENCER since its first publication, and now that it is larger and with a more extensive circulation, I believe that it might do much in opening up this country to settlement. When the road is completed there will be considerable travel from here to the Sound for the purpose of seeing the country and the purchase of merchandise. There are even at this early season many persons coming from east of the Rocky Mountains to examine the land here, and, if possible, find suitable locations where they will be free from the extreme cold and severe winters which have existed in some Northwestern States. While we of Eastern Washington have been favored with unusually fine weather. Settlers are now building homes within twenty miles of the summit of Snoqualmie Pass. If a man had mentioned such a thing four years ago, he would have been called crazy. I have always tried to obey the laws of the United States and have been loyal to the flag and government that has so long denied me the right of citizenship—the right to be represented in the Government that taxes me and makes laws affecting my life, liberty, and all private rights. I have never voted for President. Why? Not because I was not an American-born citizen; not because I had done an infamous act; not because I was a Chinaman, an Indian, or a woman or belonged to any other proscribed class, but simply because I happened to live in that particular part of the United States known and engrossed on the maps as Washington Territory.
“Settlers are now building homes within twenty miles of the summit of Snoqualmie Pass. If a man had mentioned such a thing four years ago, he would have been called crazy.”
This 1887 dispatch captures the exact moment Washington's population boom began to challenge federal territorial status. Just as these pioneers wrestled with the 'tyranny' of taxation without representation, modern Washington residents continue to navigate the friction between rapid regional growth and the limitations of federal legislative power.
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