Well He Knows The Wild Animals His Neighbors, What Fishes Are
In The Streams, What Birds In The Forests, And Where Food May Be
Found.
Hungry at times and weary, he has corresponding enjoyment in
eating and resting, and all the wilderness is home.
Some of these
rare, happy rovers die alone among the leaves. Others half settle
down and change in part into farmers; each, making choice of some
fertile spot where the landscape attracts him, builds a small cabin,
where, with few wants to supply from garden or field, he hunts and
farms in turn, going perhaps once a year to the settlements, until
night begins to draw near, and, like forest shadows, thickens into
darkness and his day is done. In these Washington wilds, living
alone, all sorts of men may perchance be found - poets, philosophers,
and even full-blown transcendentalists, though you may go far to find
them.
Indians are seldom to be met with away from the Sound, excepting about
the few outlying hop ranches, to which they resort in great numbers
during the picking season. Nor in your walks in the woods will you be
likely to see many of the wild animals, however far you may go, with
the exception of the Douglas squirrel and the mountain goat. The
squirrel is everywhere, and the goat you can hardly fail to find if
you climb any of the high mountains. The deer, once very abundant,
may still be found on the islands and along the shores of the Sound,
but the large gray wolves render their existence next to impossible at
any considerable distance back in the woods of the mainland, as they
can easily run them down unless they are near enough to the coast to
make their escape by plunging into the water and swimming to the
islands off shore. The elk and perhaps also the moose still exist in
the most remote and inaccessible solitudes of the forest, but their
numbers have been greatly reduced of late, and even the most
experienced hunters have difficulty in finding them. Of bears there
are two species, the black and the large brown, the former by far the
more common of the two. On the shaggy bottom-lands where berries are
plentiful, and along the rivers while salmon are going up to spawn,
the black bear may be found, fat and at home. Many are killed every
year, both for their flesh and skins. The large brown species likes
higher and opener ground. He is a dangerous animal, a near relative
of the famous grizzly, and wise hunters are very fond of letting him
alone.
The towns of Puget Sound are of a very lively, progressive, and
aspiring kind, fortunately with abundance of substance about them to
warrant their ambition and make them grow. Like young sapling
sequoias, they are sending out their roots far and near for
nourishment, counting confidently on longevity and grandeur of
stature. Seattle and Tacoma are at present far in the lead of all
others in the race for supremacy, and these two are keen, active
rivals, to all appearances well matched. Tacoma occupies near the
head of the Sound a site of great natural beauty. It is the terminus
of the Northern Pacific Railroad, and calls itself the "City of
Destiny." Seattle is also charmingly located about twenty miles down
the Sound from Tacoma, on Elliott Bay. It is the terminus of the
Seattle, Lake Shore, and Eastern Railroad, now in process of
construction, and calls itself the "Queen City of the Sound" and the
"Metropolis of Washington." What the populations of these towns
number I am not able to say with anything like exactness. They are
probably about the same size and they each claim to have about twenty
thousand people; but their figures are so rapidly changing, and so
often mixed up with counts that refer to the future that exact
measurements of either of these places are about as hard to obtain as
measurements of the clouds of a growing storm. Their edges run back
for miles into the woods among the trees and stumps and brush which
hide a good many of the houses and the stakes which mark the lots; so
that, without being as yet very large towns, they seem to fade away
into the distance.
But, though young and loose-jointed, they are fast taking on the forms
and manners of old cities, putting on airs, as some would say, like
boys in haste to be men. They are already towns "with all modern
improvements, first-class in every particular," as is said of hotels.
They have electric motors and lights, paved broadways and boulevards,
substantial business blocks, schools, churches, factories, and
foundries. The lusty, titanic clang of boiler making may be heard
there, and plenty of the languid music of pianos mingling with the
babel noises of commerce carried on in a hundred tongues. The main
streets are crowded with bright, wide-awake lawyers, ministers,
merchants, agents for everything under the sun; ox drivers and loggers
in stiff, gummy overalls; back-slanting dudes, well-tailored and
shiny; and fashions and bonnets of every feather and color bloom gayly
in the noisy throng and advertise London and Paris. Vigorous life and
strife are to be seen everywhere. The spirit of progress is in the
air. Still it is hard to realize how much good work is being done
here of a kind that makes for civilization - the enthusiastic, exulting
energy displayed in the building of new towns, railroads, and mills,
in the opening of mines of coal and iron and the development of
natural resources in general. To many, especially in the Atlantic
States, Washington is hardly known at all. It is regarded as being
yet a far wild west - a dim, nebulous expanse of woods - by those who do
not know that railroads and steamers have brought the country out of
the wilderness and abolished the old distances. It is now near to all
the world and is in possession of a share of the best of all that
civilization has to offer, while on some of the lines of advancement
it is at the front.
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