Old Bill Fife Played Song
of Success in Early Tacoma
 I
was doing some library work the other day when someone asked how
it happened that Tacoma named a street after a musical instrument.
Turned
out he meant Fife Street, which like the city of Fife was named
for an early settler, not a high-pitched flute.
William
H. Fife certainly deserved to have things named for him. He was
one of the area's most enterprising characters. A Canadian, born
in Ontario to Scottish immigrants, he was apprenticed at 17 to
work in a general goods store for $5 a month.
He
owned his own store by the time he was 20. At 30 he took time off
from store-keeping to join the rush to Caribou gold fields in
British Columbia. Coming back three years later with a modest
fortune, he moved his family to Michigan, then to Iowa, where he
built a store at a river crossing east of Sioux City and watched
the town of Cherokee grow up around it.
The
idea of having the first store in a growing town appealed to him.
In 1873, when Fife was 40, the Northern Pacific Railroad
was about to decide where its western terminus would be on Puget
Sound.
Fife
visited the area and happened to be on Commencement Bay when the
N.P. announced that New Tacoma was its choice. He hurried home,
sold off his Cherokee holdings, and headed west with his wife,
their five children and two servants. They arrived at the Tacoma
station on the wharf on the evening of April 14, 1874 - the day
before the Tacoma Land Company officially put downtown
lots on sale.
After
spending the night in the Blackwell Hotel, Fife sloshed up the
dirt path to Pacific Avenue, climbed the hill to C street (now
Broadway), and went to the headquarters of the Tacoma Land
Company, a one-room shack in a patch of skunk cabbage at the
southwest corner of Ninth and C. There, on the city plan sketched
by William Isaac Smith, he selected the northwest corner of Ninth
and Pacific Avenue as his first investment.
"We arrived on a Saturday,"
he recalled years later, "and on Tuesday we took dinner in
our own house. You would hardly call it a house now, but it was
somewhat of a mansion in those days, a shanty 18 by 24 feet. Nine
of us sheltered beneath its roof until I could put up a large
house, which I began without delay, a two-story frame directly in
front of the shack. This I used as a store and dwelling combined.
It was the first general merchandise store in Tacoma."
Two
months after coming to town, Fife was appointed Tacoma's
postmaster by President Grant. When the first sack of mail,
containing six letters, arrived at New Tacoma, 17-year-old Billy
Fife volunteered to hand deliver them, a service he performed
intermittently until he went to California to attend the Oakland
Military School in 1877.
Young
Billy (as he was called to differentiate him from his father, Old
Bill) also found time to play in Tacoma's first baseball game, an
inter-squad match between members of the Tacoma Invincibles. It
ended 28 to 29, both sides claiming victory.)
Anyone
wanting stamps or other postal service had to call at the Fife
store. Old Bill thoughtfully put the counter in a far corner so
patrons had to thread their way past tempting barrels of molasses,
pickles, flour, sauerkraut and fish. This encouraged conversation
as well as sales. Fife became the best-informed man in town about
business opportunities. He invested in timberland, mineral claims
and nearby farmland, one section of which is now the city of Fife.
In
an early venture, Fife bought a corner at Ninth and Market, where
there was a free-running stream. (The whole Tacoma hill was so
water-soaked that an Oregon editor joshed about the N.P. trying to
build a city in the shallowest lake or steepest swamp known to
man.) Fife built tanks, captured the spring water, piped it down
Ninth in bored-out logs, and provided Pacific Avenue with its
first tap water and a modicum of fire protection.
In
the boom that followed the completion of the transcontinental
railroad in 1883, Fife prospered. His two-story frame was replaced
by a five-story masonry business block and hotel. He became vice
president of the Tacoma Coal Co. He organized the Puget
Sound Dry Dock Co. that brought a huge floating dry dock to
Quartermaster Harbor. He was a director in the Crescent
Creamery, the Tacoma Exposition Co. and the Tacoma
Opera Theatre Company; and a trustee of the Chamber of
Commerce and the Methodist church. Newspaper estimates in 1890 put
his wealth at $1 million or $2 million. He was said to pay more
taxes than anyone in the county.
The
Panic of '93 hit Tacoma harder than any other city in the country.
Population fell from its estimated 53,000 in 1893 to a census
confirmed 37,714 in 1900. Wealth fled too.
Old
Bill lost almost everything. In '93 he was living in style in a
hotel he had named for himself. In 1896 he was in a boarding house
a block away and his old hotel was called The Donnelly.
Friends
marveled at his good humor and optimism. When word came of the
gold strike in the Yukon, Old Bill rushed north. He got no farther
than Skagway and returned as broke as when he left. He went to
live with a daughter in California who had married a congressman,
but at 70 he bolted to Nevada on news of another gold discovery.
That
didn't pan out for him either. He returned to his daughter's home
in Alameda just before his grandson was born in 1904. The child
was named for him. William Fife Knowland was to become publisher
of the Oakland Tribune and a United States senator.
Old
Bill died in January of 1905. |
