How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America

TRANSITIONS: Building a West of Cities, 1840–1940

31| San Diego, in Southern California, is the largest city in the world. If your geographies and guide-books and encyclopedias have told you otherwise, they have lied, or their authors have never seen San Diego. Why, San Diego is nearly twenty-five miles from end to end. . . . All of this must be so, because you read it in the green and gold prospectus of the San Diego Land and Improvement Company (consolidated), sent free on application. —Frank norris, “Boom” (1897) Things were looking up in the town of Whatcom again. The partners of a Whatcom land company hoped to persuade the Northern Pacific Railroad to extend its transcontinental line from Spokane across the wide Washington Territory, to Bellingham Bay, where Whatcom lay. This prospect so smote the excitable editor of the new Whatcom newspaper that he referred to that prominent trade route, “the Liverpool–New York– Whatcom–Yokohama run”—quite as if this were an everyday expression. —Annie Dillard, The Living (1992) every historian of the United States knows the symbolic meaning of the eleventh Census of 1890, when federal officials analyzing the returns declared that it was no longer possible to define a distinct frontier line on a national map. Less notorious but equally important is the statement in the same census that “the urban element in the western division . . . has gained transitions Building a West of Cities, 1840–1940 | trAnsitions 32 somewhat more rapidly than the total population.” indeed, census takers had recorded an important turning point a decade earlier when their figures showed that the level of urbanization in the Rocky Mountain and Pacific states had passed that in longer-settled parts of the nation. thirty percent of far western Americans lived in urban areas in 1880 compared to 28 percent for the country as a whole (the census counted both major cities and large towns). By the turn of the twentieth century, 52 percent of Californians were city people, followed by 48 percent of Coloradans, 41 percent of the residents of Washington, 40 percent of Utah, and 35 percent of Montana. Across the border, Canada’s 1901 census found that half of British Columbians were also urban rather than rural. the sober bureaucratic language and statistical tables echoed journalist William thayer, who reported to eastern readers in 1887 in The Marvels of the New West. High on his list were the “populous and wealthy cities that have grown into power and beauty as if by magic.” in another hundred years, he predicted, they would surpass eastern cities in enterprise and economic power. the result, he wrote in language that William Gilpin might have appreciated , would be “a national growth and consummation without a parallel in human history.” A year later journalist Charles Dudley Warner described the rising ambitions of western cities for the readers of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine: “new York complains of Chicago’s want of modesty, Chicago can see that Kansas City and omaha are aggressively boastful, and these cities acknowledge the expansive self-appreciation of Denver and Helena.”1 the process of urbanization—defined as the increasing proportion of city people among a total population—normally involves increases in the size of existing cities and the emergence of new concentrations of people and production . Western north America was no exception, but with the emphasis on new centers. Colonial cities grew, at varying speeds, but the bigger news was the mushroom growth of new places. in 1840, no city west of the ninetyfifth meridian in the future United States and Canada counted more than 5,000 residents.2 Fifty years later, twenty cities in the western United States had populations of 20,000 or more, from the metropolis of San Francisco at 298,977 to cow town Fort Worth at 23,076. only five of these places had even existed fifty years earlier—San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Galveston, and Houston. twentieth-century data show the results of continuing migration to western north America and the consolidation of the region’s economy. in 1940, just before massive mobilization for World War ii introduced a third era of urban development, 71 percent of Californians were city dwellers. the states of Colorado, Washington, and Utah and the territory of Hawaii had also passed 50 percent. Canadian statistics—although based on different definitions—show urbanization in the Prairie Provinces lagging that in the western United States by roughly a generation. Manitoba became an urban [3.15.156.140] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 04...