The Seattle post-intelligencer. [volume] (Seattle, Wash. Terr. [Wash.]) 1888-1914, 1892-12-04

Broken Hill, Portland or Winnipeg
twenty years ago--or Adelaide. when town
lots went begging within the memory OF
middle aged men? Did they lie about
Vancouver elk years since, or Creede, not
twenty months gone? Hardly; and 1t ID
Just this knowledge that leads the passer-
by to give ear to the widest statements of
the widest towns. Anything IS possible,
especially among the Rockies, where the
minerals lie, over and above the mining
towns, the centers of ranching country,
and the supply towns to the farming dis
trictS.
Let US return to the new towns. Three
times within one year did fortune come
knocking to the door of a man know.
Once at Seattle, when that town was
gray blur after fire: once at Tacoma.
in the days when the steam tram ran on
the rails twice a week; and once at Spo-
kane But in the roar Of the land boom
he did not hear her, and she went away
leaving him only a tenderness akin to
weakness for all new towns, and desire,
mercifully limited by lack of money, to
gamble in every one Of them. OF all the
excitements that life offers there are few
to be compared to the whirl Of red hot
boom; also it is strictly moral because you
do fairly earn your unearned increment
by labor and perspiration and sitting up
far into the nightly working like fiehd
as all pioneers must work. And consider
all that is in it. The headlong stampede
to the new place; the money dashed down
like counters for merest daily bread; the
arrival of the piled cars whence the raw
material of a city-men, lumber and SHIN
gie-are shot on to the not yet nailed
platform; the slashing out and peg
ging down Of roads across the
blank face of the wilderness; the
heaving up amid shouts and yelis of the
city's one electric light-a raw. sizzling
arc atop of an untacked pine pole; the
sweating, jostling mob at the sale of town
lots: the roar of .'Iet the woman have
it," That stops all bidding when the
one other woman in the place puts her
price on plot; the packed real estate
offices: the real estate agents themselves.
lost novelists of prodigious imagination;
the gorgeous pink and blue map of the
town, hung up in the bar room, with
every railroad from Portland TO Portland
meeting III its heart; the mispelled curse
against This dam hole in the ground"
scrawled on the flank of strayed freight
car by some man who has lost his money
and gone away: the conferences at street
corners of syndicates six hours established
by men not IS years old; the outspoken
contempt for the next town. also ION the
boom, and therefore utterly vile; the I'M
ceasing tramp of heavy feet on
the board pavement; where stranger
him by the shoulder, shouts in his ear,
"By Cd! Isn't it grand2 Isn't it
glorious?" and. last, the sleep Of utterly
worn-out men, three in each room, of the
shanty hotel: "All meals 81 All drinks
35 cents. No washing done here. The
Does the bald catalogue of these recitals
leave you coid2 1t is possible; but it is
also possible after three days in new
town to set the full half of q truck load of
archbishops fighting for corner lots as
they never fought for inter or crozier.
There is a contagion in boom as ire
sistible as that of panic in theater.
After while things settle down, and
then the carpenter, who is also an archi-
tect, can lay his bare arms across the bar
and sell them to the highest bidder, for
the houses are coming up like toadstools
after ram. The men who do not build
cheer those who do, in that building
means backing your belief in your town
yours to you and peculiarly confound all
other towns whatsoever. Behind the
crowd of business men the weekly town
paper plays as stockwhip plays on a
mob of cattle. There is honor, heaped ex-
travagant. imperial for the good-the en-
pioyer of labor. the builder of stores, the
spender of money; there is abuse, savage
and outrageous, for the bad, the man who
"buys out of the town." the man who in
tends to go, the sitter on the fence; with
persuasion and invitation in prose. verse
and zincograph for all that outside world
which prefers TO live in cities other than
ours.
Now the editor, as often as not, begins
rs q mercenary and ends as a patriot. This,
A few years later, If Providence is good,
comes the return for judicious Investment.
Perhaps the town has stood the test of the
boom, and that which was clapboard is
now Milwaukee brick or dressed stone,
vile in design but permanent. The shanty
hotel is the Something house. with accom-
mediation for 200 guests. The manager
who served you in his shirt-sleeves az his
own hotel clerk, is gorgeous in broadcloth,
and needs to be reminded of the first meet
ing. Suburban villas more or less adorn
the fats, from which the loveliest fancy
land fancy was free in the early days) hung
back. Horse cars jingle where the prairie
schooner used to stick fast in the mud hole
scooped to that end opposite the saloon,
and there is belt electric service paying
fabulous dividends Then do you, feeling
older than Methusalah and twice as i'm
portant, go forth and patronize things in
general, while the msnager tells you ex-
actly what sort of millionaire you would
have been if YOU had "ttayed by the town."
Or else-the bottom has tumbled ont of
the boom and the town new-made is dead
dead as young mans corpse laid out i'll
the morning. Success was not justified by
success. OF 10. 600 not 800 remain, and
these live in huts on the outskirts of the
brick streets. The hotel, with its suites of
musty rooms, is big tomb the factory
chimneys are cold the villas have no glass
in them and the fire-weed CLOVIS in the
center of the driveways, mocking the ar
rogant advertisements in the empty shops.
There is nothing to do except to catch trout
in the stream that was to have been de-
filed by the city sewage. A two-pounder
lies tanning himself just in the cool of the
main culvert. where the alders have crept
up 10 the city wall. You pay your money
and. more or less. you take your choice.
BY the time that a man has seen these
things and a few others that go with a
boom he may say that he has lived, and
talk with his enemies III the gate. He has
heard the Arabian Nights retold and
knows the inward kernel OF that romance
which some little folk say is vanished.
Here they lie in their false teeth. for Cortes
is not dead, nor Drake. and Sir Philip
Sydney dies every few months if you know
where to look. The adventures and cap
tains courageous of old have only changed
their dress a little and altered their en-
ployment 10 suit the world IN which they
move. Give came down from Loben-
gula's country few months ago pro-
testing that there was an empire
there, and finding very few that be-
lieved. Hastings studied a map OF
South Africa in corrugated iron
hut At johannesburg ten years ago.
Since then he has altered the map con-
slderahy 70 the advantage Of the empire,
but the heart of that empire is set on bal
lot boxes and small lies The illusfriolS