out. Where there are several hundred people together they should find something to do to make business, and they will if they have energy and a little capital. But there are instances. I find, of grievous disappointment, where land companies with nothing to back them have induced people to purchase their property by misrepresenting its advantages, and leaving them in the lurch when their lots were disposed of. Should a railroad company be wilfully guilty of such falsehood, an earthquake ought to swallow it up. All that the central town would gain in that case would be, possibly, some discontented laborers, driven to it by distress. In the majority of Northern Pacific towns there is some real merit, and their avowed policy benefits the country by filling it up .and connecting the settlements with a market. Therefore I am not inimical to railroad "monopoly" in this country, which would be a half-century behind the times without their aid; nor do I blame any community for resenting an abuse of power. Let them try to hold the scales even.
It is the large number of towns laid out wherever any real or pretended reason can be put forward for offering it which bewilders and sometimes distresses the disinterested observer. Suppose we glance at a few of these, beginning with Detroit, situated on an isthmus at the head of Case Inlet and the lower arm of Hood's Canal. It belongs to the Detroit Land and Improvement Company, composed of Portland, Seattle, and Spokane capitalists, who recently purchased five thousand acres of fine timber-land, and proceeded to lay out a city, grade streets, build a large hotel, erect water-works, and advertise. There is no doubt of the merits of the location as to timber, water, or harborage. A good milling-town might be built here, and railroads be induced to come. Indeed, plans are already on foot for connecting Tacoma by a line twenty-eight miles long across Kitsap County to Grig Harbor opposite Point Defiance, for extending such a line to Gray's Harbor, and another to Port Orchard. The Lnion Pacific is expected to come here from Centralia on its way to Port Orchard, Port Gamble, and to a point opposite Port Townsend, thus tapping the United States Navy Yard recently located at Port Orchard, and one of the other great milling establishments of the Sound, as well as the Straits of
