KILLED BY A “BOOM.”

Temuka Leader, Issue 2007, 13 February 1890, Page 3

KILLED BY A “BOOM.”

Taking o? “ booms,” we read the other day, in an article on “ NorthWestern Canada and its destiny,” by a correspondent of the New York Tribune, a pitiful description of a city that had died of a boom. Says the writer—“ In the course of my western correspondence I have had frequent occasion to speak of the deadly * boom,’ and audacious, absurd, and ruinous spirit of speculation which occasionally .seizes the people of a new town, and Tdrives them, like a herd of crazy cattle, pellmell into disaster. There are several towns in Canada which have been victims of the ‘ boom.’ Some have got over it. Some haven’t. I visited Pembina, last May, a town of North Dakota, that almost touches the Canadian border, a gentleman took me upon a drive. Without saying where we were going, or what we were about to see, be sped his horses over ‘ the line,’ and we were soon, riding alongside a railroad grade, evidently several years old, over which the grasses had grown. We came at length to a splendid iron bridge. It had been built of the very finest material, but had grown rusty and shabby. The board flooring had rotted away, and approaches on either side were in a wretched condition of decay. At last we drove into the town —the dismallest, dreariest an ! most woebegone town I ever saw. The stieets, once handsomely laid out and paved, were overgrown with weeds and choked with dirt. Prom countless building sites, houses that bad once stood in grassy lawns and pretty gardens were given over to prarie grasses and wild bushes. Here and there the relic of what had once, and but lately, been an imposing structure was literally rotting in the weather. Along the main street were a number of very large and well-built business blocks of brick and stone, two huge hotels and a great post office rand public building, almost entirely empty and idle, window glasses broken, locks rusted off. A more striking picture of the abomination of desolation was never presented to the human eye. This was once the city of Emerson. Eive years ago it contained 10,000 people. Business lots on Mamstreet were selling lo,ooodols a front foot. Now you can buy the whole town for what was then the price of a respectable lot. Emerson had a ‘ boom ’ and died of it.”