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Reviews
Washington Territory
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By Robert E. Ficken
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Washington State University Press, Pullman, 2002. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 288 pages. $35.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.
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Reviewed by Daniel Herman
Central Washington University, Ellensburg
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Robert Ficken's Washington Territory covers the thirty-six-year-period
between the creation of one politically defined entity, Washington
Territory, and the creation of a second, Washington State. Ficken's
analysis of how and why the first entity gave way to the second
yields 213 pages of richly documented, assiduously researched, spryly
written text.
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At its creation in 1853, Washington
Territory comprised a few tiny settlements in the Puget Sound region.
That region, rather than being connected to eastern Washington,
was connected to the Willamette Valley via the Cowlitz corridor,
a riverine route that nonetheless required a good deal of overland
travel. By the early 1860s, Washington's non-Indian population —
driven in part by the discovery of gold in what would become Idaho
and Montana — had settled Wallula on the Columbia and Walla
Walla in the southern interior of the state. From then on, Washington
Territory was divided into eastern and western constituencies with
distinct political and economic interests. Until the Northern Pacific
Railroad built a route across Snoqualmie Pass in the 1880s, these
two constituencies experienced political parity. The eastern half
of Washington — the term "half" referring to half of the non-Indian
population of the state — tended to vote Democratic, while
the western half tended to vote Republican.
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Despite the growth of the timber industry in the Puget Sound region and the wheat industry on the other side of the Cascades, Washington's history in the 1860s and 1870s was one of frustrated development. Washingtonians did not unite behind a political movement for statehood, in large part because they could not unite economically. Grain and gold from eastern Washington went to Portland via the Oregon Steamship Navigation (OSN) Company's ever-expanding monopoly on transportation, while timber from Puget Sound went to San Francisco aboard Yankee-owned vessels. Seattle, Olympia, and port locations on Puget Sound continuously sparred with Portland (and with one another) for the economic fruits of eastern Washington, with Portland coming out the victor again and again — until the Northern Pacific at long last came to Puget Sound's rescue. After the railroad was built across Snoqualmie Pass in the late 1880s, the Puget Sound region rapidly outpaced eastern Washington in population and wealth, creating the regional solidarity and conflict that continue to define the state. |
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Washington's frustrations in the territorial period were compounded by a series of incompetent and venal politicians of both the appointed and the elected variety. Ficken's study — which taps a rich vein of nineteenth-century political satire — reveals that newspaper editors were up to the challenge of making bad politicians seem even worse than they were. Ficken also reiterates the idea that the seemingly unbounded economic opportunities of the territorial era created unbounded opportunities for greed, corruption, and treachery, the forces that, almost by accident, created a state, not to mention the reputations of powerful men. Thus, Puget Sound residents could lambast Henry Villard, the power behind the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company (successor of the OSN), for holding eastern Washington in thrall, then lionize him after he gained control of the Northern Pacific Railroad in the vain hope that he would construct a Snoqualmie Pass railroad route. That he neglected to follow through on this matter led to a further round of invective against Villard after he lost control of both the Northern Pacific and the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company in 1884. What mattered to Washingtonians on both sides of the Cascades was prosperity, not consistency. |
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Those interested in the history of the Pacific Northwest will consult this book for its painstaking untangling of Washington Territory's economic and political fortunes. What they will not find is a single, unifying thesis, nor will they find something that is critical to a book that deals so heavily with geography — maps. Although the dim image of a territorial map forms the background on the book's cover, the only map within the book is a too-small reproduction of a railroad map dating from the post-statehood period. For readers unfamiliar with Washington geography, Ficken's book will pose a challenge. Nonetheless, Ficken has produced a trim yet detailed study of territorial Washington, a study that pays just enough attention to the outrageous and absurd to keep readers chuckling amid the arid stretches of economic history. This book will be invaluable to scholars of the Pacific Northwest for years to come. |
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