Rudyard Kipling and Tacoma
 In
the fall of 1889, twenty-four-year-old British journalist Rudyard
Kipling, on a tour of America, came up from California to take a
look at what he had been told was a classic example of town,
a-booming. "Tacoma was literally staggering under a boom of
the boomiest," Kipling reported in Coast to Coast his book on
American travel:
I do not quite remember what
her natural resources were supposed to be, though every second
man shrieked a selection in my ear. They included coal and iron,
carrots, potatoes, lumber, shipping and a crop of thin
newspapers all telling Portland that her days were numbered.
We struck the place at
twilight. The crude boarded pavements of the main streets
rumbled under the heels of hundreds of furious men all actively
engaged in hunting drinks and eligible corner-lots. They sought
the drinks first. The street itself alternated five-story
business blocks of the later and more abominable forms of
architecture with board shanties.
Overhead the drunken
telegraph, telephone and electric-light wires tangled on
tottering posts whose butts were half whittled through by the
knife of the loafer. Down the muddy, grimy, unmetalied
thoroughfare ran a horse-car line; the metals three inches above
road level. Beyond this street rose many hills, and the town was
thrown like a broken set of dominoes over all.
We passed down ungraded
streets that ended abruptly in a fifteen foot drop and a nest of
brambles; along pavements that beginning in pine-plank ended in
the living tree; by hotels with Turkish mosque trinketry on
their shameless tops and the pine stumps at their very doors; by
a female seminary, tall, gaunt and red, which a native of the
town bade us marvel at, and we marveled; by houses built in
imitation of the ones on Nob Hill, San Francisco, after the
Dutch fashion; by other houses plenteously befouled with jig-saw
work, and others flaring with the castlemented, battlemented
bosh of the wooden Gothic school.
The hotel walls bore a
flaming panorama of Tacoma in which by the eye of faith I saw a
faint resemblance to the real town. The hotel stationery
advertised that Tacoma bore on its face all the advantages of
the highest civilization, and the newspapers sang the same tune
in a louder key.
The real estate agents were
selling house-lots on unmade streets miles away for thousands of
dollars. On the streets-the rude, crude streets, where the
unshaded electric light was fighting with the gentle northern
twilight-men were babbling of money, town-lots and again money.
. . . I think it was the raw, new smell of fresh sawdust
everywhere pervading the air that threw upon me a desolating
homesickness.
Kipling's
companion came back from a ramble, laughing noiselessly. He
proclaimed the Tacomans mad, all mad. "Young feller," he
warned, "don't you buy real estate here." Nor did he.
Kipling took the Flyer to Seattle. It was a memorable trip, "the
water landlocked among a thousand islands, lay still as oil under
our bows, and the wake of the screw broke up the unquivering
reflections of pine and cliffs a mile away; 'twas as though we
were trampling on glass."
It
brought Kipling to a city which that summer had been swept by
fire:
"In the heart of the
business quarters there was a horrible black smudge, as though a
Hand had come down and rubbed the place smooth. I know now what
being wiped out means."
"Seattle, Seattle!
Death rattle, death rattle!" chanted Tacoma school
children. Businessmen, too, at luncheon meetings.
"Tacoma, a railroad
promotion," sneered Seattle newspapers."
"Seattle, flea-town on
the sawdust."
"Tacoma, village of
destiny."
The
high school tone of the jibes overlaid hatred. Antagonism lay
deep. Fortunes were at stake. Men had bet their futures, and
dominance in the region remained in doubt. |
