don't think that anyone can be culturally competent. i think it's a lifelong journey and it's something that we have to continue to work on. >> we can aspire to become culturally competent. but culturalsensitivity , that's much more important. >> we are in tacoma. the rate is a gateway that invites visitors to this beautiful city and we continue our look into the city's literary life, we hear a story of the tacoma eastern railroad and its role in the economic growth of the region. >> the naval line book is wales to paradise and it is about the train that ran from tacoma washington to mount rainier national park and the reason why i wanted to write the book was i wanted to focus on a specific railroad

and i found that there was very little information that was known about this train that provided a very vital service to mount rainier. we are at the famous bridge of glass in tacoma washington and this whole community owes its existence to the railroad. the northern pacific as a corporate entity had been well studied and understood, many books have been written about it. the but virtually no information was known about the tacoma eastern which was a smaller rural railroad that was very important to the upbringing of the tacoma and melt reindeer national forest. in this area in 1873 there was only several hundred people living here. when the northern pacific established the park bay as a terminus for the railroad,

this is where lincoln had charted the northern pacific to be to and in his journey connecting with the great lakes. >> knowing that speculation and of this area grew exponentially. every year after 73 leading up to the depression of 1893 and everything is out, everything is nice and mellow until we see the alaskan and yukon gold rushes and all of a sudden everything takes off again. >> it really did not have much of an influence on this area until john bagley takes over in 1899 bankruptcy.

yet he has $100,000 a year in construction bonds a walking road in building the line to the gateway to melt reindeer national parking for. and each successive development, he is attacking more and more communities. your county and their sawmills to the rail lines. one of these came a very important economic driver for not only the tacoma eastern but for tacoma as well and you see that in the formation of the st. paul and tacoma lumber company which was at the time that was built was the single largest sawmill in north america. and almost all of those logs came off the shoulders of mount rainier national park so with the transportation, the railroad really helped to

spark economic development up and down the west coast and that was in the form of the ease of transportation for agricultural goods and for the lumber industry, but it also brought in an opportunity for people to see america first and in seeing america first, one of the places that was instrumental in helping to drive heritage tourism or tourism in general was the national parks system. " the national parks system is yellowstone. after that you have your silly and the national park that was established with mount rainier. here in tacoma the railroads realized they had a golden opportunity for people and take advantage of the natural wonders that are available to them at melt rainier national

park. the tacoma eastern railroad had begun in 1890 and had built this way south 100 miles. it took them until 1905 before they got to the gateway of mount rainier national park and from there, the trip would have taken upwards of a week to be able to get there by horseback. now it only took a matter of hours. to put this into perspective, higher to the arrival of the railroad in 1905 the average stay at mount rainier national park was 30 days. when you came to recreate, you are expected to get the entire experience, meaning you came out, you brought in your packing equipment, you were going to go and either walk the wonderland trail which circumnavigation volcano where you were going to climb the peak, one or the other. each one of those undertakings took a tremendous amount of time and it took a tremendous amount of logistics. with the railroad's arrival

in 1905, the amount of time that it took to be able to stay at mount rainier national park actually blocked and put that into perspective by 1915 we had good roads running from tacoma washington to mount rainier national park and we have the automobile age coming into fruition. the average time spent at mount rainier national park prior to 1905 was 30 days. after 1915, it was eight hours. the biggest challenges that railroads face which tacoma didn't use to have challenges in the terms of time out and the mountains to climb or tunnels to be able to drill through. what they did have was a lot of political influence by the big brother, the northern pacific which was an interchange partner that they had. the northern pacific felt

like it was their responsibility to develop mount rainier national park and they did not like the idea that the tacoma eastern was going to have access to the best routes in the mount rainier national park. so they tried to develop a secondary entrance into mount rainier national park called the carbon entrance but that one was, didn't have very good access to the places that people wanted to go so be tacoma eastern became the way to get to mount rainier because it acts as the gateway in ashford, you have direct access to the facilities at longmire which is where the national, mount rainier national park headquarters was located and you also had easier access to paradise which was where everyone wanted to go. privately it was being sponsored by the milwaukee road and the milwaukee road had the chicago milwaukee st.

paul and pacific had been secretly funding the construction bonds for the tacoma eastern railroad and the tacoma eastern became a subsidiary of that railroad. when the milwaukee transcontinental arrived in tacoma in 1909, it then turned the tacoma easter into a subsidiary of the milwaukee road and at that point you were able to begin to catch a train in chicago and gall all the way to mount rainier national park on basically one ticket.so in 1919, 1918, december 31, 1918 the milwaukee roadabsorbed the eastern and a lot of its subsidiaries and formulated one gigantic corporation at that point . and at that point it became known solely as the milwaukee road. and passenger trains on that line were numerous. as you can imagine

and actually earning a decent wage. so having the chicago milwaukee st. paul and pacific around in 1909 they had to sell for second and

third best on just about everything. it put them in kind of a conundrum, economically. there was vast stretches of rail line, they had the shortest rail line between puget sound and chicago. they also had the best radiance but they didn't have very many grants lines. when you look at a study of james j hill and his development and the great northern, he purposely went to communities where he could establish a branch line to be able to feed the economics of that railroad. with the milwaukee road, you have a hard time being able to drop branch lines. that were meaningful, that brought in enough money to sustain it. being the last one in, they were the first one out. in 1980, when we see lee iacocca going before congress and asking for help to be able to bail out chrysler, we

also see the milwaukee road going before congress and asking them for a bailout as well. they had to make a choice, are we going to bail out chrysler or are we going to bail out the milwaukee road? chrysler's impact upon the nation was far bigger than in the walkie road because it was only felt from chicago to seattle and tacoma so they chose wisely. and when that caused the collapse of the milwaukee roads, not saying that was congress's fault but there were other extenuating circumstances, they didn't get the bailout and chicago did. became the single largest bailout in american history at that time but i'd like to take away from books like rails to paradise is that railroads are relevant and irrelevant for a number of different reasons. they contribute to broad patterns of our social history. tacoma would not have developed the way it had had

it not been for the advent of the railroad. there are also persons that are very important to our task which leave us a legacy for future generations to be able to remember them by. there's also engineering significance, the construction or the aid that was went in theconstruction by the japanese , that's an often overlooked aspect so we have to look at what a story like the development of the tacoma eastern house to teach us in the future. and i believe that the book does a very good job in being able to lay out that this was an important and significant railroad not only to tacoma but to the region as well. >> next from our trip to tacoma, university of washington tacoma economics professor catherine baird offers her thoughts on the state of the us education system. >>