Angus Mackintosh, H. L. Yesler, James McNaught, J. J. McGilvra, Dexter Horton and J. M. Colman. During the next legislative session McGilvra procured the passage of favorable laws. Gen. James Tilton made an estimate of the cost of the road by two different routes. One, by way of the Yakima Valley, at about three and one-half million dollars, and one by way of Priest Rapids at about half a million more. Notwithstanding these fabulous figures, the stock of the company found buyers, but not in sufficient number to build a four-million dollar railroad. The people therefore decided to start their railroad with their own labor. Southward from the little town clustered around Yesler's sawmill stretched a tide flat whose eastern and western boundaries were Beacon and West Seattle hills. With indefinite and changing shore lines this tide flat extended to the mouth of the Duwamish River. Filled in with sand dredged from its own shallow depths, and earth washed down from the adjacent hills, that tide flat is today Seattle's wholesale and manufacturing district, the working place of many thousands of men and women, but on May 1, 1874, it was a formidable obstacle in the way of railroad building. Piling grew on the hillsides and piling, driven into the tide flat homes of unnumbered millions of clams would provide a bridge over which the trains could run to solid ground at Steele's Landing on the Duwamish. At Steele's Landing work should begin with a monster picnic on May Day. May Day morning dawned bright and fair-good omen foretelling success for the enterprise that day to be instituted. Early in the morning men and boys carrying axes, grubbing hoes, shovels and other clearing and grading tools were ferried across to the landing. Within a short time they were followed by women and girls carrying filled baskets. The workers were to be well fed. Seattle streets were deserted. The saws of Yesler's mill were silent. The sailing vessels moored at the dock awaited the return of the longshoremen and stevedores. The noon meal completed, the laborers turned to speech making, for who ever heard of Americans setting in motion a great enterprise without speech making? It was decided that every man who could do so should give one day each week towards the building of the road. The results of the first day's work were satisfactory and caused everybody to become enthusiastic. But building railroads along Puget Sound hillsides with the tools used by the pioneers was a stupendous task. More than a year passed before the road was pushed through the first fivemile stretch to the Renton coal miness. Transporting coal was profitable business and the promoters now felt their road entitled to congressional assistance. A. A. Denny went to Washington to assist Delegate McFadden to obtain a land grant, but Congress already was suffering from the bad taste of land grants and it refused to do anything for the Seattle road. Judge Orange Jacobs succeeded McFadden as delegate and the directors hoped that he, a Seattle man, would be able to succeed where his predecessor had failed. But the land grant again was refused. Early in 1876 the directors placed J. M. Colman in charge of the road and instructed him to build through to the Newcastle coal mines. Colman was operating the Yesler mill under lease and was about as busy a man as the directors could have found. For this reason, perhaps, he was able to inject life into the project. His first offer was that he would put $10,000 into the road provided Seattle people would meet it with $50,000. The offer was not taken and Colman came back with another-to advance $20,000 provided his neighbors and business associates would raise $40,000. This was accepted and Colman made things move lively on the construction work, so lively that in a short time the fifteen-mile stretch to the mines was completed and in operation. Editor Prosch was mistaken when he said the arrival of the first Northern Pacific construction train at the Tacoma end of the Kalama-Tacoma line marked the first appearance of a locomotive upon the shores of Puget Sound. Puget Sound's first locomotive was "The Bodie," a little engine brought up from San Francisco and used in hauling coal cars from the south end of Lake Union to the bunkers stretching out into Elliott Bay from the foot of Pike Street, Seattle. Outcroppings of the King County coal fields were first discovered in 1853 by Dr. M. Bigelow while clearing land on his farm on Black River, a short distance below Renton. In 1862 L. B. Andrews discovered the Issaquah field and carried into Seattle in a flour sack samples of coal from that mine. One year later Edwin Richardson, while surveying a township line east of Lake Washington, discovered the Coal Creek outcroppings and set in motion a stampede for the hills around what is now known as Newcastle. George F. Whitworth, Daniel Bagley, P. H. Lewis, John Ross and Selucius Garfielde, in 1866, organized the Lake Washington Coal Company and opened the first tunnel on the hillside above Coal Creek. Years of struggle followed. Seattle people realized the importance of developing the coal mines; but they had little money for the work. Efforts to finance the industry failed until in 1870 the company was reorganized as the Seattle Coal & Transportation Company, owning the claims of Edwin Richardson, Josiah Settle and C. B. Bagley. At great labor and expense a quantity of the coal was brought to Seattle and offered to the captain of the United States revenue cutter Lincoln with the request that he test it. The Lincoln had been burning wood and the peaty coal from California, and when the fireman placed the Newcastle coal beneath the boilers he developed a heat of unexpected intensity. The mine owners felt greatly encouraged. The great question was that of transportation from the mine to tide water. It was decided to barge the coal across Lake Washington to Union Bay, transport it across the portage there by tramway, load the cars upon barges which would carry them to the south end of Lake Union and there deliver them to another tramway leading to the bunkers at Pike Street. Some twenty-five thousand dollars were expended in providing this round-about-system of transportation. Coal was brought over the line and then the men who had labored so long for the development of their mines were forced, because of lack of capital, to sell out. San Francisco was the financial center of the Pacific Coast and it was two San Franciscans, Charles D. Shattuck and S. Dinsmore, who took charge of the Seattle Coal & Transportation affairs. The new owners, early in 1872, shipped "The Bodie" north and late in March gave the people of Seattle the first railroad excursion ever conducted in Washington. The Seattle Intelligencer of March 25th, thus tells the story: "Friday last was decidedly a holiday in this city owing to the opportunity afforded everyone to indulge in the novelty of a free ride behind the first locomotive that ever whistled and snorted and dashed through the dense forests sur rounding the waters of Puget Sound. Business in town was not exactly suspended, but it might very near as well have been, as an excursion on Dinsmore's Railroad, connecting Union Lake with the Sound, with its constantly departing and returning train of cars during the day, seemed uppermost in the minds of all, and pretty much monopolized every other consideration." Eight bright new coal cars were the passenger coaches used in this excursion. At II o'clock in the morning "The Bodie" pulled out from Pike Street with the first train load of excursionists. Half an hour was required for the round trip to Lake Union and the locomotive and its cars were kept almost constantly in motion until 5 o'clock in the afternoon. By the end of the summer the little railroad was carrying from seventy-five to one hundred tons of coal daily to the bunkers, Newcastle had received an addition of twenty-five new houses and sixty men were employed in the mines. June 16, 1877, while the Western Shore and the Washington Libby were receiving cargoes of coal, the 800-foot bunkers that had cost the company $30,000 to build, suddenly gave way and crashed into the bay. Teredoes had eaten off the piles upon which the bunkers were built. Seattle owes much to the coal industry. Just at the time when the Northern Pacific was trying its best to make Tacoma the leading city on the Sound-efforts in which the railroad company threw every possible obstacle in the way of the progress of the rival town-King County coal fields came to the rescue with millions of tons of coal. They enabled Seattle to increase her population and her commercial importance in a period of financial depression and powerful opposition. Olympia, in common with other towns on the Sound, developed terminus ambitions as soon as the building of the Northern Pacific was announced. Being the nearest Sound point to Kalama her people felt the directors of the road would build to Budd's Inlet and that having accomplished this end would rest content with their work. This idea was further strengthened by the appearance of Ira Bradley Thomas and his short land buying career. John Goodwin and General Sprague, in letters to Marshall Blin and other Olympia citizens, stated the railroad would make the capital city the terminus, one letter of June 29, 1872, going so far as to state: "the line of railroad runs to the east side of Budd's Inlet to the Billings or Wylie donation claim, said claim being in sections 25, 26, 35 and 36 of township 19, range 2 west and a point will be selected on one of said claims. for a freight and passenger depot, where said line will terminate." This, however, was before General Cass had "laid down the law" regarding Canfield, Rice, and their Lake Superior and Puget Sound Company. Olympia speculated. Land prices were raised to a high level and then came the telegram which caused so much joy in Tacoma, and so much gloom in Seattle. Olympia was in the same boat as the latter city, except, perhaps, that in her enthusiasm she had built to greater heights and had a greater distance to fall. Fall she did. Rents tumbled along with land prices, and went down to almost nothing at all. The products of the Chehalis and Skookumchuck valleys sought a market at the new town and Olympia merchants pocketed a loss of business. In January, 1874, a meeting was held in the office of Hazard Stevens and the Olympia Railroad Union was organized with Hazard Stevens, president; S. D. Howe, vice president; F. A. Hoffman, secretary; R. W. Ryerson, treasurer; T. F. McElroy, Ira Ward and S. W. Percival, board of appraisers. A survey |