In 1893 there were 44 states in the Union. Washington, which had become a state in 1889, had a population one-twentieth of today’s. Civilization was thinner and the land wilder. In Seattle, men could go duck hunting on Lake Union. It was a time of horse-drawn wagons and dirt roads. To go from Seattle to Tacoma, people took the train or one of the Puget Sound steamers.

         Children grew up sooner. In the King County schools, half the pupils in the sixth grade dropped out by the end of the seventh, and only one in four made it to graduation. Youth went to work earlier, married earlier, and started families — big families — earlier. A modern reader, reading of a bank president, might imagine him 50 or 60 years old; in the 1890s, he was as likely to be 30.

         Religion was big in civic life. Newspapers paid attention to what mainstream Protestant pastors said, and sometimes printed their sermons in the Monday paper.

         Males made up 62 percent of the state population and conducted virtually all business and public affairs. Women worked as stenographers, bookkeepers, cooks, waitresses, seamstresses, laundresses, nurses and schoolteachers. Married women worked at home, stoking coal stoves, baking bread, canning fruit, hand-washing laundry, stitching dresses, darning socks, mopping the floor and caring for children. If a housewife was well-off, she might have a Swedish girl as a servant. But times were changing: in 1894 a mill at Cosmopolis made the news by employing women to pack shingles. 

         Women would not win the vote in Washington general elections until 1910, but in 1890 a law gave them the vote in school elections. In 1894 the voters of Clallam County elected a woman, Ella Guptill, superintendent of schools. The man who lost sued, arguing that the job was not open to women, and the judge in the Clallam County Superior Court — a man, of course — gave the job to him. In 1896 the Washington Supreme Court — all men, again — gave the job back to her.

         Women had a few advantages. In the 1890s an unmarried woman could receive county welfare when a man could not. But in 1894, the Seattle P-I reported that Bertha Siegel, whose beau had married her in a shotgun wedding and deserted her, was turned down for welfare in Pierce County because she was married to an able-bodied man. 

         In the 1890s, Prostitution was tolerated but rarely named; the newspapers called it “the social evil.” The word “abortion” was rarely used. In July 1893 a physician in Spokane was charged with having performed “a criminal operation” on 14-year-old Georgie Bishop. There were other taboos. In April 1895, the Spokane Chronicle had four page-one stories, datelined London, of the accusations against Oscar Wilde of “various relations with boys and men” that amounted to “gross indecency,” without saying what the acts were. 

         There was no taboo against calmly expressed racism. Noting that 24 percent of people in Washington were foreign-born, the Spokane Chronicle reassured its readers that most of them were from Northern Europe. “Even including the 4,000 Chinamen,” it said, less than 3 percent of the people came from countries “experts have branded ‘undesirable’.” The Seattle Press-Times, the ancestor of today’s Seattle Times, called the Chinese “an alien and non-assimilative portion of our population, against whom a justifiable prejudice is entertained by our workmen.” At least Seattle had Chinese; since expelling them in 1885, Tacoma had fewer than could be counted on one hand.

         Nationally, lynching peaked in the early 1890s. During the 1880s and 1890s, Washington averaged about one lynching a year. No blacks were lynched in Washington in those years, though in 1895, 50 masked men at Walla Walla came in the night for a young white man who had been living openly with a colored woman, a brothel keeper, and had just married her. The mob tarred and feathered them.

         Life was less sanitary then. Downtown Seattle’s streets were planked.  The planks broke under the wagon wheels and sank into the mud and horse excrement. The Tacoma Ledger, describing the pedestrian “sloshing over rickety sidewalks and floating planks in the streets” asked its readers to imagine themselves “smirched with Seattle’s slime.” Most toilets were outhouses. Seattle’s Board of Health reported many cases of “unconnected sewers,” “overflowing cesspools” and “filthy privies.”