Judged on the merits of the reasons

The news story beside the advertisement gives the term the advertisement leaves out: the money went to the best argument, not the closest guess.

Three sentences on page 8 turn the contest into something else. Entrants sent a number, and with it their reasons for the increase in not more than twenty-five words, and the award was decided on the reasons.

So the Bend Park Company was not buying predictions. It was buying advocacy — a hundred dollars for the best twenty-five words on why this town would grow — and then, as the Bulletin says approvingly, it would have many people studying Bend's future whether they won or not.

Fourteen months later, in the same town, the Emblem Club's founder told twenty men at a dinner that enough of them wearing a mark and saying a sentence "would build a city of one hundred thousand". The club's oath is that proposition sworn rather than entered. This project does not claim the contest caused it; it records that the company which drew the emblem had already run the argument as a competition, and that the emblem's copyright notice was printed eight months after the closing date.

The Bulletin thought the method itself was the point: a novel way to attract attention to Bend.