Henry George in Washington State

Eldridge Morse, Jr.

[From the Memoirs of Eldridge Morse, Jr., published in 1892]

As I remarked of my boyhood situations, that I always knew where I was going next, so when San Francisco discharged me I had another place in sight. It was Snohomish, Washington, where as city editor of a weekly and tri-weekly small-town paper called The Eye, I began life in circumstances about as new to me as when I came into atmospheric existence in 1857 or to New York in 1875. An account of that will begin in Chapter One, Volume II.

My newspaper partner in Snohomish, 1891-1893, was Clayton H. Packard, who still survives. Mr. Packard has read the fifty-odd pages of manuscript covering our association in Independent Journalism, and returned it with few corrections. This is a story of wide-open spaces, surrounded by tall timber, where men wore mackinaws. The moccasin tracks were there visible, as well as the Indians who made them. -- G.E.M.

All the economic reformers brought their doctrine to the Liberal Club, perhaps the only open forum in the city. Henry George, author of "Progress and Poverty," made a speech there on the 14th of January, the club having met to hear a lecture by Henry Appleton on Ireland. That was the first time I saw Henry George. His book, published two years earlier by the Appletons, New York, was then in its fourth edition, and coming out in London, Paris and St. Petersburg. Mr. George's head looked large for his body; he wore a presentable red beard, and spoke English with a pronunciation acquired abroad -- perhaps of his mates on British sailing vessels. His book was reviewed in The Truth Seeker, April 16, by the lawyer and author, Edward W. Searing, who married the deaf and voiceless Laura Catherine Redden ("Howard Glyndon"), poet and newspaper correspondent.