Denny hill had boasted a hotel upon its summit, which in the late eighties Seattle regarded as an architectural triumph, a wooden thing of angles and shingles and queer Queen Anne turrets and dormers. The name of the old hotel went to a new one which supplanted it at a proper altitude for a city that was determined to be metropolitan—and the new hotel was a dignified structure worthy of the best town in all this land.
"We had to do it," the Seattle man will tell you, without smiling. "We have got to be ready for a population of a million or more. Our house has got to be in order."
It is not every day that one can see an American metropolitan city in the making.
*****
Back of the high-crested hills that have been suffered to remain as a part of the topography of this remarkable town—for its residents still like to perch their smart new houses where they may command a view of Puget Sound or the snow-capped Rainier—is as lovely a chain of lakes as was ever given to an American city. Boston would have made the edges of these the finest suburbs in the land; she is trying some sort of an experiment of that kind with her dirty old Charles river. Seattle saw in the great bowl of Lake Washington something more.
"We can crowd into Portland a little more," said the shrewdest of her citizens, "by making this lake into a fresh-water harbor."
Just what the advantages of a fresh-water harbor may be to Seattle which already possesses one of the finest deep-water harbors on the North Pacific, may be obscure to you for the moment. Then the Seattle man informs you that Portland has a fresh-water harbor, that the masters of ships, still thirty days' sailing from port, make for its haven, knowing that in fresh water the barnacles that make so great a drag upon a vessel's progress will fall away from the hull. A fresh-water bath for a salt-water hull is better than a drain-off in a dry dock—and a great sight cheaper.
Here, then, is a masterful new town seeking new points of advantage over its rivals, piercing canals through to its backyard lakes so that it may eventually be as completely surrounded by docks and shipping as are New York and Boston. It is impossible to think of Seattle ever hesitating. Seattle proceeds to accomplish. Before she has a real opportunity to count the cost, the improvements which she has undertaken are rolling in revenue to her coffers.
*****
Tacoma is smaller than either Seattle or Portland—and not one whit less vigorous than either of them. She has not undergone the wholesale transformations of her sister to the north and still retains all the aspects of a busy port of the Far North—long reaching wharves, busy, dirty railroad yards reaching and serving them, fir-clad hills rising from the water, the smell and industry of lumber—and back of all these her mountain. It is her mountain—"The Mountain that was God" as the Indians used to say—and if for long weeks it may stay modestly hidden behind fog-banks, there do come days when its great snow-capped peak gazes serenely down upon the little city.