Cities have origin myths – the stories they tell themselves, often without much concern for authenticity or fact.
They are usually semi-heroic episodes about military conquest, a founder’s lucky discovery of an unexplored, unclaimed Eden, or the arrival of pioneers after a gauntlet of hardships. Statues and plaques are mounted to mark where the city was born, and, as time and convenience work their magic, things move around.
Tacoma’s beginnings have no such mythic romance. Our city was born, or perhaps more accurately avoided dying, in the cold Christmas season of 1873.
In the last year of the Civil War and his life, Abraham Lincoln signed the charter for an ambitious northern transcontinental railroad. Improbably, Commencement Bay was selected as its end point on the Pacific.
The decision was made in July 1873, just as the tracks headed west and then north from the Columbia River were reaching the Tenino area. A serious problem loomed, however. A condition in the land grant charter required that the railroad reach saltwater just before Christmas or millions of acres along the line would be forfeited.
A second, more serious problem was that the Northern Pacific railroad, along with the entire nation, was headed toward an economic collapse. The best chance for saving the whole enterprise was to rush the track-laying in a straight line across the glacial prairie between the Nisqually River and Commencement Bay and then begin cashing in on the real estate value of a newly created terminal port city.
By the end of September, the financial crash came and the House of Jay Cooke, bond seller for the NP, collapsed. With no money for wages, a quarter of the workers quit, armed themselves and barricaded the track 25 miles from Tacoma. Then, it started to rain.
The situation, which meant certain death for the City of Tacoma, was famously averted when Capt. J.C. Ainsworth, NP’s West Coast manager, put up his own money to pay the strikers. The legendary deep woods engineer E.S. “Skookum” Smith was put in charge of a last major push to reach the ocean with a steam locomotive.
Over the next two months, 750 Chinese laborers graded the line to the crest of Commencement Bay near the south end of today’s Hilltop neighborhood. At one point, workers covered 14 miles in 18 days. But now they faced the most complicated and uncertain section of the work: the drop to the sea.
Between the engineers, surveyors, timber cutters and Chinese gang bosses, a diagonal 80-foot-wide shelf was mapped across the hillside, creating a railroad grade down to tidewater. The steepness exactly matched the climbing horsepower of the locomotives. To save time, the crews used the trees they cleared on the hill for wood ties and fuel.
Then, it started to snow.
END IN SIGHT
One day that December, a Chinese laborer in a mud-soaked, quilted silk jacket standing near what became 17th Street and Pacific Avenue looked up from his work and noticed through the cedars the saltwater of Commencement Bay. He was seeing what Abraham Lincoln only dreamed of – the completion of the Northern Pacific transcontinental railroad. At 3 p.m. on Dec. 16, 1873, a crowd of people bundled in heavy coats, long capes and trade blankets assembled somewhere along the fresh railroad tracks that crossed a City of Tacoma yet to be born.
They were there to drive a last spike. Around them were work camps, steam-age machinery, canvas tents and tree stumps that no one expected to last long. At their feet, however, was a wide swath of cleared, level ground marked by iron rails that climbed the hill and set off for the prairie and the continent beyond.
Today, as another Christmas approaches in Tacoma, if you find yourself downtown near where a skating rink adds cheer to Pacific Avenue, take note of the diagonal open space that ramps gently down the hillside through the University of Washington Tacoma campus and under Interstate 705.
Never broken, narrowed or built upon, it’s the Prairie Line, the last terminal section of the transcontinental railroad – and the very certain place where the City of Tacoma began at Christmas a long time ago.
Michael Sean Sullivan is principal at Artifacts Architectural Consulting and an adjunct faculty member at the University of Washington Tacoma. Email him at michaelsullivan@artifacts-inc.com.
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