As the terminal of the new Northern Pacific Railroad, Tacoma—­ lying on the bluffs overlooking the great inland sea of Puget Sound, guardianed by the vastness of its mountain—­was backed by forests whose wealth could scarcely be exaggerated, even by promoter’s advertisements.  She was noisily proclaimed to be the “Gateway to the Orient,” but trade was not yet firmly established with the Orient, and, indeed, what was Washington’s wealth of uncut timber when the capital to develop it was slowly ebbing Eastward?

No paper without heavy capitalization, could have sustained a policy of political reform, when, in the picturesque vernacular of the time and place, “the bottom had dropped out of the town.”  A rival newspaper, the Ledger, in order to retrench, began a war on the Printers’ Union, to break wages.  Lane repudiated the effort made to “rat” his paper and to force the Union out.  He sustained his men in their fight to keep the Union rate, and lent them his presses to carry on their propaganda.  In after years he said, “As to my labor record, it is a consistent one of thirty years length, ever since I stood by the Union in Tacoma, and went broke.”  Again he wrote to an acquaintance, “I often think of the old days in Tacoma.  We were a fighting bunch, and I think most of us are fighting for the same things that we fought for then; a little bit more decency and less graft in affairs, and a chance for a man to rise by ability and not by pull alone.”

In April, 1893, Lane had married Anne Wintermute—­he needed all he could find of cheer in those depressing days.  The whole town was beaten to its knees by loss and fore-closure.  Lane was struggling to hold together his paper, and save his friend’s investment and his own little stake.  The one bright interlude of that time for him lay in reading, and in his new friendships.  He loved to chant aloud to a group of stranded young fellows gathered in his rooms, in his gay trumpeting way, brave passages from the Barrack-Room Ballads, of Kipling, that were lifting the spirits of the English-speaking world with their freshness and daring.  Stevenson, too, with his polished optimism delighted Lane.  “I can remember,” says one of the group, “just how I heard him read aloud the last words from Stevenson’s essay, Aes Triplex, in those melancholy Tacoma days—­’those happy days when we were so miserable!’":—­

“All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. ...  Does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?  When the Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the Gods love die young, I cannot help believing they had this sort of death also in their eye.  For surely, at whatever age it overtake the man, this is to die young.  Death has not been suffered to take so much as an illusion from his heart.  In the hot-fit of life, a-tip-toe on the highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side.  The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.”