Thomson Didn't Climb, He
Dug
 An
Indianan of Scotch descent, Reginald H. Thomson was twenty-five
years old when he came to Seattle in 1881. A precise, school
teacherish Presbyterian, he decided at once that the town "was
in a pit and that to get anywhere we would be compelled to climb."
But when he became city engineer in 1891, instead of climbing, he
dug.
He
dug a sewer north to Lake Union, an enormous sewer, "far too
large for a city of forty thousand" some taxpayers
complained. Next he laid a pipeline over the hills from the Cedar
River and argued the City Council into eighty thousand acres of
land in the watershed to prevent pollution. With sanitation and
the water supply attended to, Thomson turned his attention to the
walls of the pit.
The
grades on streets over the hills were twenty per cent in some
places; they were impossible for horse-drawn vehicles. Thomson
felt that the bottleneck formed by the hills was the only real
threat to Seattle's continued growth.
In
1898 he began to apply to the hills the sluicing methods used in
Alaskan mining. He literally washed the tops off them.
Denny
Hill went first; five million cubic yards of earth were sluiced
down onto the tideflats and the maximum grade on the north/south
streets was reduced to five per cent. Another three million cubic
yards came off the Jackson Hill, and two million from Dearborn
Hill. In all, sixteen million cubic yards were washed away, and
when Thomson was through, traffic could move easily north and
south. Ballard and West Seattle were brought within the city
limits.
By
1910 the city was level enough to take advantage of the
automobile, which greatly increased land transportation. Most
traffic along the Sound had to flow through Seattle, and the
city's dominance of the region was secure. Seattle was no longer a
leading Washington city. It was the metropolis.
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