Boom Time
The Eliza's monopoly on the main route was broken in 1869, when first she was taken off the main route. Her owners led by Captain Finch, replaced her with the newer Olympia. To make matters worse, the mail contract which had sustained Eliza was awarded to a firm of upstart competitors, led first by Captain Nash, and then by his financiers the Starrs, who had found the cash to buy the Varuna and build the sidewheeler Alida and the propeller Tacoma in the water. A fare war broke out, and on June 23, 1871, the Starrs brought into Puget Sound the then-new sidewheeler North Pacific to run against the Olympia. When North Pacific proved faster than Eliza, the fare war was ended with the customary anti-competitive agreement, whereby the Starrs would pay Finch for keeping the Eliza and Olympia at the dock. Captain Geo. E. Starr died in 1876, but his company survived him, and built in 1879 the sidewheeler George E. Starr named in his honor.
By the 1880s and 1890s the population the Puget Sound region had risen greatly, and steamboat technology had also improved. Many new and fast vessels were launched, such as the sternwheelers Greyhound and Bailey Gatzert and the famous propeller steamer Flyer. Roads were still poor, and of course there were as yet no automobiles. The water route was the preferred way to travel between the cities on the Sound. In 1890, for example, regular daily service began between Tacoma and Seattle with the Greyhound. In the early 1900s, larger and more durable steel hulled boats were either built at Puget Sound shipyards, like the Tacoma (launched 1913) or brought in from other areas, like Indianapolis, Iroquois, and Chippewa. The Tacoma could make the run from Seattle to Tacoma in 77 minutes dock to dock.
Read more about this topic: Puget Sound Mosquito Fleet
Famous quotes containing the words boom and/or time:
“California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)
“Every time I bestow a vacant office I make a hundred discontented persons and one ingrate.”
—Louis XIV (1638–1715)