Scripture envisages a time when “Every valley shall be lifted up/ every mountain and hill made low / and the uneven ground shall become level .…” (Isa. 40:4 (RSV).) While the meaning of this prophecy is quite another story, the imagery fits one surveyor’s mission to transform Seattle at the turn of the twentieth century. R. H. Thomson, Seattle city engineer, ca. 1931. Museum of History & Industry Seattle was established on the hills and tidal mud flats along the eastern shore of Elliott Bay, a natural deep-water port in Puget Sound. Fed by a Mount Rainier glacier, the Duwamish River carried timber and coal to Elliott Bay for trade.…