The City of Destiny vs. The Emerald City: How a Telegram Changed Northwest History
I've told you about mountains that killed men and canyons where crews traded dynamite like harsh words. Now let me tell you about a killing done with a single sheet of yellow paper, and no blood spilled at all — just a young town's pride, laid out cold on the floor of a sawmill.
It was the fourteenth of July, 1873, and Seattle had been waiting on that telegram the way a man waits on a jury. The Northern Pacific was building its line west to salt water, and whichever town it named as terminus would get the depot, the shops, the traffic, the whole future. Seattle had put its best foot forward — offered up seventy-five hundred town lots, three thousand acres, fifty thousand dollars in hard cash, two hundred thousand more in bonds, and a strip of its own waterfront besides. A town can't bid much harder than that without handing over the keys entirely.
The Telegram at Yesler's Mill
Arthur Denny stood up at Yesler's mill that day to read the wire out loud to the gathered crowd, and I expect he already knew, from the shape of the silence in that room, that the news wasn't going to be kind. The message was short, the way bad news so often is: we have located the terminus on Commencement Bay. Not Elliott Bay. Not Seattle at all. Forty miles south, on a stretch of shoreline most of Seattle's citizens had scarcely bothered to name.
A town can offer the railroad its whole inheritance and still watch the depot go up somewhere else. Seattle learned that lesson in one telegram, standing in a sawmill, in front of the whole town.
The men who made that call were railroad men through and through — R. D. Rice and J. C. Ainsworth, sitting on the Northern Pacific's land committee, weighing grades and harbor depth and, so the story's always been told in these parts, weighing the price of land they'd already gone and quietly bought up around Commencement Bay before ever telling the public where the line was headed. A promoter named Matthew McCarver had platted a town there already — Tacoma City, he called it — and he wasn't a man to have wasted the paper. When the telegram landed, Tacoma lit up with the kind of celebration a town throws exactly once in its life, and took to calling itself the City of Destiny from that day on.
What Seattle Built Out of Spite
Now, a lesser town takes a blow like that and folds. Seattle didn't fold. It got angry, and it got to work, which in my experience is the more useful of the two. Arthur Denny, Henry Yesler, and Dexter Horton — the same names you'll find behind half of early Seattle's ledgers — went and built their own railroad rather than wait on the Northern Pacific's mercy. They called it the Seattle and Walla Walla, and though it never got anywhere close to Walla Walla, it did reach the coal seams out at Newcastle, and that was enough to keep the town's lungs working while the bigger railroads sorted out their business elsewhere.
In 1880 that little line passed into the hands of Henry Villard — a name you'll know if you've heard me tell of his blind pool and his brief, spectacular reign over the Northern Pacific itself — who folded it into the Columbia and Puget Sound Railroad. It wasn't a transcontinental. It wasn't even close to one. But it was Seattle's, built with Seattle's own money because nobody else was going to build it for them, and a town that builds its own way out of a hole tends to remember how, long after the hole's forgotten.
The City That Wasn't Supposed to Win
The Northern Pacific finally drove its transcontinental line through to Tacoma in 1887, fourteen years after that telegram, and for a while the City of Destiny looked like it might live up to the name. By 1890 the two towns were near enough neck and neck, Seattle a hair ahead with something like forty-two thousand souls against Tacoma's thirty-six thousand — close enough that a betting man wouldn't have called it either way.
Then the Klondike gold rush hit in 1897, and Seattle did what Tacoma, by temperament, would not: it hollered about itself in every newspaper east of the Rockies, and outfitted every fool with a pickaxe who came through looking for a way north. Tacoma thought that kind of noise beneath a City of Destiny. Seattle had no such pride to protect. By the time the dust of the gold rush settled, and Great Northern's own James J. Hill finally struck a deal to share Seattle's new King Street Station with the Northern Pacific in 1906, the outcome wasn't in doubt any longer. The town the railroad snubbed at Yesler's mill had grown up to dwarf the one it chose.
What Really Happened
On July 14, 1873, the Northern Pacific Railroad's land committee, led by R. D. Rice and J. C. Ainsworth, announced Commencement Bay (Tacoma) as the railroad's western terminus, rejecting a Seattle bid that had offered roughly 7,500 town lots, 3,000 acres, $50,000 in cash, $200,000 in bonds, and waterfront access. Arthur Denny read the telegram announcing the decision to Seattle residents gathered at Henry Yesler's mill. Promoter Matthew McCarver had already platted "Tacoma City" on Commencement Bay in anticipation, and Tacoma adopted the nickname "City of Destiny."
In response, Seattle businessmen including Denny, Yesler, and Dexter Horton built the Seattle and Walla Walla Railroad, a local line reaching the Newcastle coal fields. Henry Villard acquired and reorganized it as the Columbia and Puget Sound Railroad in 1880. The Northern Pacific's transcontinental line reached Tacoma in 1887. By 1890 Seattle and Tacoma were close in population (roughly 42,000 to 36,000); Seattle's aggressive promotion during the 1897 Klondike Gold Rush, among other factors, accelerated its growth well past Tacoma's in the decades that followed. Seattle's King Street Station, shared by the Northern Pacific and James J. Hill's Great Northern Railway, opened in 1906. The lantern-keeper's voice and dialect above are storytelling; the dates, figures, and outcomes here are drawn from the historical record.