person were spoken the spirit would be disturbed. This superstition afforded Seattle a pretext for demanding pay while yet alive for the discomfort the frequent sound of his name would cause him after death, and thereafter he became a pensioner on the bounty of the Seattleites.
The New York of Alki Point, like all the many namesakes of the great metropolis, came to nothing, and was forgotten until very recently speculators bought up the land and laid out West Seattle, since which period many improvements have been made, with a railroad connecting the peninsula with the city on the mainland. The growth of Seattle was slow so long as there were no railroads in the country, and the commerce of the Sound was confined chiefly to an export trade with California in lumber and coal, with some cargoes of lumber to foreign ports. In 1870 the whole exports of Puget Sound in foreign and American vessels amounted to four hundred and forty thousand nine hundred and fifteen dollars, the largest part of which was in lumber. The imports from foreign countries were light, amounting to only thirty-three thousand one hundred and five dollars. Ship-building added something to the business of the Sound, but the spell of loneliness which brooded over these silent shores had not then been broken, except by
" The first low wash of waves, where soon Should roll a human sea."
Then came the promise of a transcontinental railroad, and then the road itself. Presto, change! Up went business houses and dwellings, with improvements of every kind. In 1880 the population of this twenty-eight-year-old town was three thousand five hundred; in 1888, one year after the railroad had crossed the Cascades, it was twenty thousand; in 1889, when over seven million dollars' worth of property was destroyed by fire, it was twenty-seven thousand; and in 1890 it is, according to the census, forty-one thousand four hundred and sixty-four. No wonder that to repair the damages by fire, and to provide shelter for so rapid an influx of people, the streets are obstructed with lumber, brick, stone, and iron, while many tent-cloth houses are yet to be seen. Order is, however, in the main restored, and, as I have said, the city has a metropolitan aspect, particularly when
