Railroads are a major source of travel and movement of goods across the state since Northern Pacific Railroad made their way under Stampede Pass a few years earlier to produce the "then" second longest tunnel in the United States. Other railroad companies follow suit. The fairly new state is becoming a presence in the economy of the western half of the United States.
Seattle, though, fights Northern Pacific President Charles Mellon as he buys Seattle waterfront property between Washington and University street with plans for a train depot in 1899. (It took until 1906 before it was a reality with all the bad feelings. The Seattle Post Intelligencer jumps on the bandwagon and touts the new station.) Progress prevails.
Changes are going on around the state. In 1899 a big migration of the black population comes to Washington State to work in coalmines in Roslyn, Franklin and Newcastle, Washington. The National Council of African-Americans organize in 1899 and the Seattle Local Council forms under President Conrad Rideout.
That same year in Seattle horseshoers form their own union, as do shingle weavers and sawmill workers who saw the shingles. Labor unions are a significant presence - a big change, since just ten years earlier most folks were self-employed. (The next year's census shows 3,105 miners, 5,947 loggers and rafters, 3,734 sawmill workers, 1,202 fishermen and oystermen and 8,224 agricultural laborers in Washington State.)
Washington includes a higher population of foreign-born residents than the United States as a whole. It is the melting pot of the United States.
Rudyard Kipling visits Seattle and Tacoma in the previous decade (he thought we were quite uncivilized, actually) and finds Tacoma "...staggering under a boom of the boomiest." As a matter of fact, Tacoma, Seattle, Spokane and Portland, Oregon at the time held nearly one-third the entire population of Oregon, Washington and Idaho.
Spokane, because of its dominating presence in Eastern Washington earned the name of the Inland Empire. Seattle enjoyed continuing staggering growth after the big fire of 1889. (In 1890 it was a town of 42,000 people.)
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