One hundred dollars for the best reason Bend would grow

Eight months before it published the emblem, the Bend Park Company offered $150 for the public's estimate of what Bend's population would be on 1 July 1912.

The company had arrived in the Bulletin five months earlier as a publisher, announcing The Bend Book. Here it is buying attention a different way, in a single column between a Victrola advertisement and the classified column, on the editorial page.

The arithmetic in the advertisement is the arithmetic the Emblem Club would later swear by. A railroad had just arrived — two of them, on the first of November — and the town it reached held a thousand people. The question is what eight months of that would do.

It ran four weeks — 22 and 29 November and 6 and 13 December 1911, page 4 each time, unchanged, and every one of the four is filed here and read at its own image. The Bulletin weekly never printed a result. Every issue from the 1 March close through 14 August 1912 was searched for the award, the winner, the winning figure or the bank, and the contest is not mentioned again.

The prize money was real enough to be banked before it was offered, and the bank was in Seattle, where the company was. So was the address: 860-861 Empire Building, the same suite the company would print at the foot of its advertisement in July 1912, two weeks after publishing the emblem.