Environmental Engineering Reference
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urban boosters recognized that the growth of the settlement could not rely
on its original economy of natural resource extraction and would need to
expand to compete with the larger towns of Tacoma, Portland, and San
Francisco. To spur economic growth, a new interpretation of nature would
emerge to frame Seattle's nature as beautiful but also incomplete. Historian
Coll Thrush summarizes this new perspective of a town in dire need of
human improvement: “Seattle was a bad place to build a city. Steep sand
slopes crumbled atop slippery clay; a river wound through its wide, marshy
estuary and bled out onto expansive tidal fl ats; kettle lakes and cranberried
peat bogs recalled the retreat of the great ice sheets; unpredictable creeks
plunged into deep ravines—all among the seven (or, depending on whom
you ask, nine or fi fteen) hills sandwiched between the vast, deep waters
of Puget Sound and of Lake Washington.” 47
Beaton makes a similar observation, stating that the glaciers that shaped
the landscape left the city as a “tousled, unmade bed” with undulating hills
that provided breathtaking views but hindered economic development. 48
This new perspective on nature in Seattle at the turn of the century rec-
ognized the landscape as both a blessing and a curse; the city was notable
not only for what it contained but also for what it lacked. 49 Furthermore,
some of the most rigorous promoters of economic development held an
implicit belief that nature's abundance and the moderate climate led to
unproductive behavior. 50 Settlers could achieve extraordinary results with
little effort, so there was a lack of impetus for urban development. 51 The
curse of the bountiful landscape was that it led to idleness and a lack
of ambition. 52 To correct the problems of the city, the landscape would
be subjected to rigorous transformation so that nature and its residents
could realize their full economic and social potential. The Prometheans
of Seattle recognized that the region had been blessed with a surplus of
natural resources that could and should be exploited to achieve widespread
societal progress. Subsequent processes of “improvement” would require
signifi cant human intervention to change the human/nature relationship
through the application of the latest technological advances, resulting in
the creation of the contemporary municipal government and the economic
engine of the city.
Three events in the last decade of the nineteenth century fueled Seattle's
transformation from a fl edgling settler outpost into a contemporary city
defi ned by urbanization, large-scale capital investment, and the bureau-
cratization of government and business. 53 First, the aforementioned ar-
rival of the Great Northern Railroad in 1893 allowed Seattle to compete
economically with its closest urban rival, Tacoma. Second, the discovery
of gold in the Klondike territory of Canada in 1897 transformed Seattle
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