RARE WASHINGTON TERRITORY NEWSPAPER

olympia-wash-1869-mh.jpgTHE PACIFIC RAILROAD/”A RIVER UNDER THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS!”/
“WRETCHEDNESS OF MORMON WOMEN!”

The Olympia Transcript, Washington Territory
Saturday, May 1, 1869

Here is a very scarce Washington Territorial newspaper from Olympia, the first capital of the Territory. The front page has a lengthy report supporting government aid for the new railroads connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific. Just nine days after this paper was published, the Union Pacific met the Central Pacific at Promontory Point where the last spike (“The Golden Spike”) was laid and the two engines met, thus further opening up the West to settlement and gold prospecting.

“WRETCHEDNESS OF MORMON WOMEN” IS AN INDICTMENT ON POLYGAMY AND THE PLIGHT OF MORMON WIVES AND CHILDREN. In part, “These women never have known what it is to love or to be loved. They know only sacrifice. They are slaves–in bondage to the church and to the devil at the same time. They are ground into powder between two mighty millstones–the upper one a religious idea, the lower one the lewdness and lust of hard-hearted men.”

“A River Under the Rocky Mountains”is a front page story concerning an expert whose travels in North and South America, and into both the Andes and Rocky Mountains, and his study of ocean currents, led him to write about “….the discovery of a river under the Rocky Mountains many times larger than the Mississippi, its course nearly twice the Mississippi’s length, and gliding through the clean and vast rocky cellars of the upheaved mountains without the loss by alluvial absorptions and solar evaporations which diminish valley rivers, it takes along in its course the sinking streams and lakes of the mountains of Mexico, and with them, perhaps by a hundred mouths in its deep bed, debouches unseen into the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico.” This article is a must read!

Four large pages, wide margins, and in very fine condition. I bought this originally to try to complete a set of 19th century newspapers from every state and territory. Anyone want to attempt this worthy feat–call me!

$285

olympia-wash-1869-rocky-mt-river048-2.jpg

Posted by mmitchell | Filed Under All Historic Newspapers, The Wild West