Show Lesson Fourteen: |
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This kind of productive growth was hardly limited to timber. The industrialization or mechanization symbolized by railroads and steam donkeys revolutionized every extractive industry. The fishing industry underwent its own considerable changes, as the story of three technological innovations illustrates. The development of internal combustion engines during the early 20th century enabled fishing boats to travel further in pursuit of fish and made it much easier for crews to handle large nets and catches. The invention of the so-called "iron chink" during the first decade of the century expanded the productive capacity of canneries by mechanizing the process of salmon butchering. ("Chink" was, of course, a derogatory word for Chinese. The "iron chink" was named and marketed as a machine that both replaced and improved upon the highly skilled Chinese salmon butchers who had occupied such an important position in the canneries.) Finally, as Northwesterners began to worry, as early as the 1870s and 1880s, about the depletion of runs of salmon in the region's streams, the development of hatcheries offered the hope that the reproduction of fish, too—like the production of sawmills and canneries—could be mechanized and thus increased. The increasing output of canned salmon seemingly confirmed the benefits of technology as applied to regional fisheries.
Right: Every Pacific Northwest city had its own way of boosting its growth. In Tacoma, businessmen asked everyone to "Watch Tacoma Grow" and publicized their campaign in the local newspapers. (Tacoma Daily News, June 10, 1907)
Mechanization—of transportation, resource extraction, and manufacturing—brought immense changes to the Pacific Northwest, then, and cemented the role of extractive industry as the dominant activity in the region. For example, on the eve of the First World War in 1914, and a spurt of war-related manufacturing, timber payrolls accounted for 55 percent of all salaries and wages in the Pacific Northwest. Logging and milling would remain the region's premier industry until another, bigger spurt of war-related manufacturing occurred during World War Two. The identity of the region, even more than before, became that of a place from which raw materials flowed to other locales, and one which needed to import more costly, manufactured goods from distant places with more developed economies.
If the Northwest as an entire region became known as a resource hinterland, it should nonetheless be noted that the influence of extractive industries was not the same across the region. The three states of Idaho, Washington, and Oregon were all profoundly defined by such enterprises as mining and fishing and logging. However, Oregon remained slightly different. Its founding by farmers during the 1840s and 1850s, located particularly in the Willamette Valley, gave it a distinctive economic and political orientation (as David Alan Johnson has argued in Founding the Far West: California, Oregon and Nevada, 1840-1890 [1992]) that its neighbors did not share. Idaho and Washington, by contrast, took shape under the largely undiluted influence of extractive industries. Not coincidentally, Washington and Idaho became better known than Oregon for the roles that big business and big labor played in them. The Seattle writer Ivan Doig has characterized the differences (in Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America [1980]):
"What I have been calling the Pacific Northwest is multiple. A basic division begins at the Columbia River; south of it, in Oregon, they have been the sounder citizens, we in Washington the sharper strivers. Transport fifty from each state as a colony on Mars and by nightfall the Oregonians will put up a school and a city hall, the Washingtonians will establish a bank and a union."
Edmund S. Meany, (left). (Special Collections, University of Washington, negative #17818)
What did people make of the rising industrial production of the later 19th century? While railroads and industrialism both had troublesome aspects to them, they also fulfilled the region's longstanding desires for growth. Boosters looked at the figures of increasing population and increasing output, and concluded that the Pacific Northwest had begun to realize the great potential they had long touted. Moreover, they took advantage of the recent growth to promote the region to still more investors and immigrants and industry. Consider the comments of Edmond S. Meany, the first historian of the Pacific Northwest at the University of Washington. Before he became a university professor in 1895, Meany worked as publicist and booster for Washington at the state's exhibition at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. His message at the Chicago world's fair was simple: "The natural resources of the State are vast and inexhaustible." Other promoters of the state also spoke as if its resources and opportunities were infinite. One resident from the Puget Sound area expounded in 1914 or so upon the unlimited things that Washington offered:
Why should I not love Seattle? It took me from the slums of the Atlantic coast, a poor Swedish boy with hardly fifteen dollars in my pocket. It gave me a home by the bountiful sea; it spread before my eyes a vision of snow capped peaks and smiling fields; it brought abundance and a new life to me and my children and I love it, I love it! If I were a multimillionaire I would charter freight cars and carry away from the crowded tenements and noisome alleys of the eastern cities and the Old World the toiling masses, and let them loose in our vast forests and ore-laden mountains to learn what life really is.
In the Northwest it was common, in the years before World War One, to regard Washington's resources as virtually unlimited, and capable of absorbing an enormous increase of population. Observers from outside the region, by contrast, were more skeptical—no doubt because they were less personally engaged in the regional economic growth. At the same world's fair where Meany promoted the Evergreen State as a place of "inexhaustible" natural resources, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner talked about the closing of the American frontier. His remarks, based upon the Census Bureau's 1890 comment that the amount of "free land" available to homesteaders was now in rather short supply, suggested a new sense of limits to the nation. The centuries-long migration from east to west had finally run up against the Pacific Ocean—as well as against the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains and Great Basin—and for this reason and others Americans began to recognize barriers to their economic and territorial aspirations that they had not understood before. The development of federal programs to conserve natural resources—e.g. by creating Forest Reserves (later called National Forests) during the 1890s, or National Parks such as Mt. Rainier in 1899 and Crater Lake in 1902—illustrated how this new sense of limits began to operate on the Pacific Northwest.
The article "Puget Sound," by Helen Hunt Jackson, published on the eve of the transcontinental railroad's arrival in 1883, provided another outsider's recognition that the region's natural resources were indeed finite.
Helen Maria Fiske was born in Amherst, Connecticut on October 15, 1830. She married twice, first to Major Edward Bissell Hunt (who died in 1863), and then to Colorado financier William Sharpless Jackson. She began her writing career following the death of her first husband using the nom de plume "H. H." for many of her poems, essays, travel pieces (of which her visit to Puget Sound was one), and novels. She became a zealous convert to Indian reform in 1879 after hearing a lecture on the condition of the Poncas, a midwestern tribe forced to resettle in Indian Territory. She spent the next two years compiling evidence to document the effects of federal Indian policy on Native Americans in the West. The result of this work, A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United State's Government's Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes, was published in 1881. Helen Hunt Jackson's attention was then drawn to the Mission Indians of California where, in 1883, she was appointed to investigate their conditions and suggest legislation (which was not passed by Congress) to correct injustices. This work lead to her last novel, Ramona, published in 1884, one year before her death. Jackson's concern about the treatment of Indians made her into a reformer, and she brought this perspective to her observations of conditions around Puget Sound. Note that her article appeared in the same year as the transcontinental railroad to the Northwest was finished. Jackson meant to give eastern audiences a glimpse of the newly accessible region. (For more information see Ruth Odell, Helen Hunt Jackson. New York, D. Appleton-Century Company, 1939.)
Helen Hunt Jackson, (right). (Ruth Odell, Helen Hunt Jackson. Photo courtesy of Ruth Davenport. Facing p. 170.)