1. A city of two thousand

On the morning of January 4, 1913, a Seattle businessman named W. D. Cheney boarded the observation car of a transcontinental train at Portland, and the porter asked him where he was bound.

“To the metropolis of Central Oregon.”

“Oh, Bend! Change cars at Fallbridge.”

That night, at a dinner table in Bend, Cheney told the story as evidence. A year earlier, he said, no porter on a limited train could have answered the question at all. “That, gentlemen, is what builds cities.” He was talking to twenty men in a town he called two thousand, and he was explaining what they had all been doing for a year and a half.

They had been selling Bend. Cheney was president of the Bend Park Company, a Seattle land firm with lots to sell in an addition southeast of town, and its method from the start was print. In June 1911 it announced The Bend Book, fifty-eight pages and sixty-seven photographs, written by Cheney himself. No copy has been found.

In November 1911, three weeks after the first train reached Bend, the company ran a contest in the Bulletin. It offered $150 in prizes to whoever best guessed what Bend’s population would be the following July. “The population then was 1,000,” the advertisement said. “In eight months’ time what will it be?” The catch was in the rules. Every guess had to come with reasons, in not more than twenty-five words, and the prizes would go to the best reasons rather than the closest number. The company was paying people to argue that Bend would grow. No winner was ever announced.

Bend had wanted a mark of its own before any of this. In January 1908 a merchant named A. M. Lara proposed a device “about the size of a dollar” for every Commercial Club member’s letterhead, and the club offered ten dollars for the best design. No winner was ever reported, and nothing connects Lara’s idea to what came next.

On July 3, 1912, the Bend Park Company bought a page of the Bulletin and printed, in the white space at the top of it, a small black disc with the word BEND cut out of it in tall white letters. Beneath the disc, in a ruled box, the company said what it meant to do.

The above brand is copyrighted. The Bend Park company, to whom it belongs, intend to devote a life-time to making this brand a coveted guaranty of integrity, optimism, persistence, co-operation, hospitality, and municipal patriotism — in other words, and succinctly, to make it an emblem of TRUE SUCCESS.

Two weeks later the same company ran another long advertisement in the same paper and did not use the mark. Not even the firm that claimed it treated it as a house brand. It was a mark for a town, and the town took it up at once.

That same month the Bend booth at Seattle’s Potlatch festival was “decorated throughout with blue and gold, the colors of the Emblem Club,” with an electric transparency of the emblem lit inside it. Printed on July 24, 1912, that sentence is the first time the club is named anywhere. In September a special train brought Seattle visitors to Bend with the emblem, electrically lit, on its rear platform. In December the Bulletin’s press ran off ten thousand copies of a booklet called What Others Say About It, with a blank square on the back cover so that anybody could stamp a name in it and send it on.

The emblem is older than the club, and the club is older than the dinner where it sat down to explain itself. The land company that drew the mark meant to devote a lifetime to it. The men who swore by it six months later did not invent it. They adopted it, and a decade later they would give it away.