the john muir exhibit - writings - steep_trails - chapter 19
Chapter 19
People and Towns of Puget Sound
As one strolls in the woods about the logging camps, most of the
lumbermen are found to be interesting people to meet, kind and
obliging and sincere, full of knowledge concerning the bark and
sapwood and heartwood of the trees they cut, and how to fell them
without unnecessary breakage, on ground where they may be most
advantageously sawed into logs and loaded for removal. The work is
hard, and all of the older men have a tired, somewhat haggard
appearance. Their faces are doubtful in color, neither sickly nor
quite healthy-looking, and seamed with deep wrinkles like the bark of
the spruces, but with no trace of anxiety. Their clothing is full of
rosin and never wears out. A little of everything in the woods is
stuck fast to these loggers, and their trousers grow constantly
thicker with age. In all their movements and gestures they are heavy
and deliberate like the trees above them, and they walk with a
swaying, rocking gait altogether free from quick, jerky fussiness, for
chopping and log rolling have quenched all that. They are also slow
of speech, as if partly out of breath, and when one tries to draw them
out on some subject away from logs, all the fresh, leafy, outreaching
branches of the mind seem to have been withered and killed with
fatigue, leaving their lives little more than dry lumber. Many a tree
have these old axemen felled, but, round-shouldered and stooping, they
too are beginning to lean over. Many of their companions are already
beneath the moss, and among those that we see at work some are now
dead at the top (bald), leafless, so to speak, and tottering to their
fall.
A very different man, seen now and then at long intervals but usually
invisible, is the free roamer of the wilderness -- hunter, prospector,
explorer, seeking he knows not what. Lithe and sinewy, he walks
erect, making his way with the skill of wild animals, all his senses
in action, watchful and alert, looking keenly at everything in sight,
his imagination well nourished in the wealth of the wilderness, coming
into contact with free nature in a thousand forms, drinking at the
fountains of things, responsive to wild influences, as trees to the
winds. 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.
Notwithstanding the sharp rivalry between different sections and
towns, the leading men mostly pull together for the general good and
glory, -- building, buying, borrowing, to push the country to its place;
keeping arithmetic busy in counting population present and to come,
ships, towns, factories, tons of coal and iron, feet of lumber, miles
of railroad, -- Americans, Scandinavians, Irish, Scotch, and Germans
being joined together in the white heat of work like religious crowds
in time of revival who have forgotten sectarianism. It is a fine
thing to see people in hot earnest about anything; therefore, however
extravagant and high the brag ascending from Puget Sound, in most
cases it is likely to appear pardonable and more.
Seattle was named after an old Indian chief who lived in this part of
the Sound. He was very proud of the honor and lived long enough to
lead his grandchildren about the streets. The greater part of the
lower business portion of the town, including a long stretch of
wharves and warehouses built on piles, was destroyed by fire a few
months ago
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, with immense loss. The people, however, are in no
wise discouraged, and ere long the loss will be gain, inasmuch as a
better class of buildings, chiefly of brick, are being erected in
place of the inflammable wooden ones, which, with comparatively few
exceptions, were built of pitchy spruce.
With their own scenery so glorious ever on show, one would at first
thought suppose that these happy Puget Sound people would never go
sightseeing from home like less favored mortals. But they do all the
same. Some go boating on the Sound or on the lakes and rivers, or
with their families make excursions at small cost on the steamers.
Others will take the train to the Franklin and Newcastle or Carbon
River coal mines for the sake of the thirty- or forty-mile rides
through the woods, and a look into the black depths of the underworld.
Others again take the steamers for Victoria, Fraser River, or
Vancouver, the new ambitious town at the terminus of the Canadian
Railroad, thus getting views of the outer world in a near foreign
country. One of the regular summer resorts of this region where
people go for fishing, hunting, and the healing of diseases, is the
Green River Hot Springs, in the Cascade Mountains, sixty-one miles
east of Tacoma, on the line of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Green
River is a small rocky stream with picturesque banks, and derives its
name from the beautiful pale-green hue of its waters.
Among the most interesting of all the summer rest and pleasure places
is the famous "Hop Ranch" on the upper Snoqualmie River, thirty or
forty miles eastward from Seattle. Here the dense forest opens,
allowing fine free views of the adjacent mountains from a long stretch
of ground which is half meadow, half prairie, level and fertile, and
beautifully diversified with outstanding groves of spruces and alders
and rich flowery fringes of spiraea and wild roses, the river
meandering deep and tranquil through the midst of it. On the portions
most easily cleared some three hundred acres of hop vines have been
planted and are now in full bearing, yielding, it is said, at the rate
of about a ton of hops to the acre. They are a beautiful crop, these
vines of the north, pillars of verdure in regular rows, seven feet
apart and eight or ten feet in height; the long, vigorous shoots
sweeping round in fine, wild freedom, and the light, leafy cones
hanging in loose, handsome clusters.
Perhaps enough of hops might be raised in Washington for the wants of
all the world, but it would be impossible to find pickers to handle
the crop. Most of the picking is done by Indians, and to this fine,
clean, profitable work they come in great numbers in their canoes, old
and young, of many different tribes, bringing wives and children and
household goods, in some cases from a distance of five or six hundred
miles, even from far Alaska. Then they too grow rich and spend their
money on red cloth and trinkets. About a thousand Indians are
required as pickers at the Snoqualmie ranch alone, and a lively and
merry picture they make in the field, arrayed in bright, showy calicoes,
lowering the rustling vine pillars with incessant song-singing and fun.
Still more striking are their queer camps on the
edges of the fields or over on the river bank,
with the firelight shining on their wild jolly faces.
But woe to the ranch should fire-water get there!
But the chief attractions here are not found in the hops, but in
trout-fishing and bear-hunting, and in the two fine falls on the
river. Formerly the trip from Seattle was a hard one, over corduroy
roads; now it is reached in a few hours by rail along the shores of
Lake Washington and Lake Squak, through a fine sample section of the
forest and past the brow of the main Snoqualmie Fall. From the hotel
at the ranch village the road to the fall leads down the right bank of
the river through the magnificent maple woods I have mentioned
elsewhere, and fine views of the fall may be had on that side, both
from above and below. It is situated on the main river, where it
plunges over a sheer precipice, about two hundred and forty feet high,
in leaving the level meadows of the ancient lake basin. In a general
way it resembles the well-known Nevada Fall in Yosemite, having the
same twisted appearance at the top and the free plunge in numberless
comet-shaped masses into a deep pool seventy-five or eighty yards in
diameter. The pool is of considerable depth, as is shown by the
radiating well-beaten foam and mist, which is of a beautiful rose
color at times, of exquisite fineness of tone, and by the heavy waves
that lash the rocks in front of it.
Though to a Californian the height of this fall would not seem great,
the volume of water is heavy, and all the surroundings are delightful.
The maple forest, of itself worth a long journey, the beauty of the
river-reaches above and below, and the views down the valley afar over
the mighty forests, with all its lovely trimmings of ferns and
flowers, make this one of the most interesting falls I have ever seen.
The upper fall is about seventy-five feet high, with bouncing rapids
at head and foot, set in a romantic dell thatched with dripping mosses
and ferns and embowered in dense evergreens and blooming bushes, the
distance to it from the upper end of the meadows being about eight
miles. The road leads through majestic woods with ferns ten feet high
beneath some of the thickets, and across a gravelly plain deforested
by fire many years ago. Orange lilies are plentiful, and handsome
shining mats of the kinnikinic, sprinkled with bright scarlet berries.
From a place called "Hunt's," at the end of the wagon road, a trail
leads through lush, dripping woods (never dry) to Thuja and Mertens,
Menzies, and Douglas spruces. The ground is covered with the best
moss-work of the moist lands of the north, made up mostly of the
various species of hypnum, with some liverworts, marchantia,
jungermannia, etc., in broad sheets and bosses, where never a dust
particle floated, and where all the flowers, fresh with mist and
spray, are wetter than water lilies. The pool at the foot of the fall
is a place surpassingly lovely to look at, with the enthusiastic rush
and song of the falls, the majestic trees overhead leaning over the
brink like listeners eager to catch every word of the white refreshing
waters, the delicate maidenhairs and aspleniums with fronds outspread
gathering the rainbow sprays, and the myriads of hooded mosses, every
cup fresh and shining.
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