8. Carrying it forward

No contemporary source here explains it, and the book does not: the founder says only that enough men wearing the mark and saying the sentence “would build a city of one hundred thousand”. The nearest thing to an explanation is in the Bulletin, thirty years late and at second hand. Its obituary of Cheney in February 1943 says he predicted, “following the coming of the railroad and with the establishment of two large lumber mills in the offing”, that Bend would “become another Spokane,” and perhaps grow to a city of 100,000. A memory, not a record, but it names the town the arithmetic was borrowed from, and it names the man. The club had been trading on that railroad from the start: its first publication, in December 1912, opens with James J. Hill in his own words.

The Deschutes Historical Museum reached the same town independently in its June 2020 newsletter, and its account is worth reading because it is specific about why.

The Great Northern Railway reached Spokane in 1892 and the city grew from just over 19,000 to 104,000 by 1910; when the same railway won the Deschutes River Railroad War and steamed into Central Oregon in the autumn of 1911, “the promise of such a boon seemed all but assured for Bend as well”. The museum adds that by the club’s own calculations its members expected to reach a hundred thousand by 1937, and that the war, the irrigation projects, dry-land farming and the Depression took that apart, while Spokane, having led the arithmetic, began losing population after 1910.

This is a 2020 account and not a 1913 one, and two things in it are unverified here. The museum names its evidence as newspaper accounts between 1915 and 1919, which have not been read for this site; and the figure of 1937 is an arithmetic attributed to the club with no source given for it. Both are leads rather than citations, and both are on the record.

The oath named a number and not a date, and three bodies count Bend in three ways: a full census every ten years, the Census Bureau's annual estimate between them, and the estimate Portland State certifies for the state. Each figure the site has weighed against the number, in the order it was published:

The Bureau's 2019 estimate crossed the line first and its own 2020 count then came in below it, which is what an estimate is. Portland State rebased its series on that count and certified Bend past the line in 2021. Both current series now agree to within a few hundred people, and neither has been below the number since 2021.

All twelve are from a US Census Bureau source: the last of them, the 2020 count, from table P1 of the official redistricting file on 13 September 2026. The 1950 and 1970 volumes are scans whose embedded text renders 5,415 as “6,415”, so no figure here rests on character recognition: each was reconciled against the printed change and percent-change columns, which work as a checksum.

Two cautions carried from the sources themselves. The 1990 count exists in two official versions, 20,469 as published and 20,447 as later revised, and this site uses the revised figure. And the rise from 1990 to 2000 reads as 154 percent growth, but the Bureau’s geographic-change notes say Bend city “gained and lost territory”: part of it is the boundary moving, not people arriving.

The 1913 book calls Bend “a town of two thousand”, and that is the club’s own founder speaking in the year of the oath. It is a contemporary claim, and it is the only source for the figure: no census supports 2,000.

The nearest counts are 536 in 1910 and 5,415 in 1920. The years between are not published for places, so interpolating to reach 1912 would be guessing a source value. The figure is kept because it is sourced, and attributed because it is a claim rather than a count.

A town that had counted 536 in 1910 could have held two thousand by 1913, and the founder had every reason to round upward at a dinner about the city Bend would become. Both numbers are on this page for that reason: 536 is what was counted, two thousand is what was said, and the promise was made against the second.