Rainier May Be Seen In Spotless White, Looking Down Over
The Dark Woods From A Distance Of Fifty Or Sixty Miles, But So High
And Massive And So Sharply Outlined, It Seems To Be Just Back Of A
Strip Of Woods Only A Few Miles Wide.
Mt. Rainier, or Tahoma (the Indian name), is the noblest of the
volcanic cones extending from Lassen Butte and Mt.
Shasta along
the Cascade Range to Mt. Baker. One of the most telling views of it
hereabouts is obtained near Tacoma. From a bluff back of the town it
was revealed in all its glory, laden with glaciers and snow down to
the forested foothills around its finely curved base. Up to this time
(1879) it had been ascended but once. From observations made on the
summit with a single aneroid barometer, it was estimated to be about
14,500 feet high. Mt. Baker, to the northward, is about 10,700 feet
high, a noble mountain. So also are Mt. Adams, Mt. St. Helens, and
Mt. Hood. The latter, overlooking the town of Portland, is perhaps
the best known. Rainier, about the same height as Shasta, surpasses
them all in massive icy grandeur, - the most majestic solitary
mountain I had ever yet beheld. How eagerly I gazed and longed to
climb it and study its history only the mountaineer may know, but I
was compelled to turn away and bide my time.
The species forming the bulk of the woods here is the Douglas spruce
(Pseudotsuga douglasii), one of the greatest of the western giants.
A specimen that I measured near Olympia was about three hundred feet
in height and twelve feet in diameter four feet above the ground. It
is a widely distributed tree, extending northward through British
Columbia, southward through Oregon and California, and eastward to
the Rocky Mountains. The timber is used for shipbuilding, spars,
piles, and the framework of houses, bridges, etc. In the California
lumber markets it is known as "Oregon pine." In Utah, where it is
common on the Wahsatch Mountains, it is called "red pine." In
California, on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, it forms, in
company with the yellow pine, sugar pine, and incense cedar, a pretty
well-defined belt at a height of from three to six thousand feet
above the sea; but it is only in Oregon and Washington, especially
in this Puget Sound region, that it reaches its very grandest
development, - tall, straight, and strong, growing down close to
tidewater.
All the towns of the Sound had a hopeful, thrifty aspect. Port
Townsend, picturesquely located on a grassy bluff, was the port of
clearance for vessels sailing to foreign parts. Seattle was famed
for its coal-mines, and claimed to be the coming town of the North
Pacific Coast. So also did its rival, Tacoma, which had been selected
as the terminus of the much-talked-of Northern Pacific Railway.
Several coal-veins of astonishing thickness were discovered the
winter before on the Carbon River, to the east of Tacoma, one of them
said to be no less than twenty-one feet, another twenty feet, another
fourteen, with many smaller ones, the aggregate thickness of all the
veins being upwards of a hundred feet.
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