The City of Destiny: How the Railroad Made Tacoma
Near Tacoma, Washington
On July fourteenth, eighteen seventy-three, a committee of surveyors and railroad officials announced their decision from a temporary office in the Washington Territory: the western terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad would be Tacoma. Not Seattle. Not Olympia.
Tacoma, a muddy collection of a few dozen buildings on a bluff above Commencement Bay. The announcement transformed everything. Until that moment, Tacoma was a minor settlement whose primary claim to distinction was a water-powered sawmill that a Swedish immigrant named Nicolas Delin had built along a creek in eighteen fifty-two.
Job Carr, a Union Army veteran who had arrived on Christmas Day of eighteen sixty-four and claimed a hundred and sixty-eight acres of land, had been serving as postmaster out of his cabin. The town had ambitions it could not yet back up. The railroad changed the arithmetic entirely.
The Northern Pacific needed a deep-water Pacific terminus capable of handling oceangoing cargo. Commencement Bay offered exactly that, one of the finest natural harbors on the Pacific Coast, sheltered from open water, connected by the Puyallup River delta to the agricultural interior. The first steam locomotive arrived in Tacoma on December sixteenth, eighteen seventy-three.
The transcontinental line was completed a decade later, in eighteen eighty-three. What followed was a boom of staggering speed. Tacoma's population was one thousand and ninety-eight people in eighteen eighty.
By eighteen ninety, it was thirty-six thousand. Rudyard Kipling visited in eighteen eighty-nine and observed, with some alarm, that the city was literally staggering under a boom of the boomiest. The boosters adopted a slogan, the City of Destiny, and meant it without irony.
That the Northern Pacific had chosen Tacoma over Seattle was, for a generation, a genuine wound in the civic psychology of the larger city to the north. Seattle built its own railroad connections and eventually eclipsed Tacoma in size and prominence. But the decision of eighteen seventy-three put Tacoma on the map in the most literal sense possible.
Without it, none of what came after, the mills, the copper smelter, the architecture, the particular character of this city, would have had occasion to happen.
