The Difficulties Encountered By The Explorer
In Penetrating The Wilderness Are Presented Mostly By The Streams And
Bogs, With Their Tangled Margins, And The Fallen Timber And Thick
Carpet Of Moss Covering All The Ground.
Notwithstanding the tremendous energy displayed in lumbering and the
grand scale on which it is being carried on, and the number of
settlers pushing into every opening in search of farmlands, the woods
of Washington are still almost entirely virgin and wild, without trace
of human touch, savage or civilized.
Indians, no doubt, have ascended
most of the rivers on their way to the mountains to hunt the wild
sheep and goat to obtain wool for their clothing, but with food in
abundance on the coast they had little to tempt them into the
wilderness, and the monuments they have left in it are scarcely more
conspicuous than those of squirrels and bears; far less so than those
of the beavers, which in damming the streams have made clearings and
meadows which will continue to mark the landscape for centuries. Nor
is there much in these woods to tempt the farmer or cattle raiser. A
few settlers established homes on the prairies or open borders of the
woods and in the valleys of the Chehalis and Cowlitz before the gold
days of California. Most of the early immigrants from the Eastern
States, however, settled in the fertile and open Willamette Valley or
Oregon. Even now, when the search for land is so keen, with the
exception of the bottom lands around the Sound and on the lower
reaches of the rivers, there are comparatively few spots of
cultivation in western Washington. On every meadow or opening of any
kind some one will be found keeping cattle, planting hop vines, or
raising hay, vegetables, and patches of grain. All the large spaces
available, even back near the summits of the Cascade Mountains, were
occupied long ago. The newcomers, building their cabins where the
beavers once built theirs, keep a few cows and industriously seek to
enlarge their small meadow patches by chopping, girdling, and burning
the edge of the encircling forest, gnawing like beavers, and
scratching for a living among the blackened stumps and logs, regarding
the trees as their greatest enemies - a sort of larger pernicious weed
immensely difficult to get rid of.
But all these are as yet mere spots, making no visible scar in the
distance and leaving the grand stretches of the forest as wild as they
were before the discovery of the continent. For many years the axe
has been busy around the shores of the Sound and ships have been
falling in perpetual storm like flakes of snow. The best of the
timber has been cut for a distance of eight or ten miles from the
water and to a much greater distance along the streams deep enough to
float the logs. Railroads, too, have been built to fetch in the logs
from the best bodies of timber otherwise inaccessible except at great
cost.
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