Page:Atlantis Arisen.djvu/287



for improving its main business street. The railroad company's shops and round-house will be here, and trains will be running from Tacoma to Ocosta on the 1st of March, 1891. About the same time, if not sooner, trains will be running from Tacoma to the city of Gray's Harbor, over the Tacoma, Olympia and Gray's Harbor Railroad, or, as people here call it, c: Hunt's road." The developments to follow on both sides of the harbor will probably far outdo the progress of the previous year.]

It is evident, from the superficial observations here recorded, that the State of Washington has a good possession in the valley of the Chehalis, from its eastern end, where it includes the coalfields and lumber-tracts in the vicinity of Chehalis City and Centralia, to the Pacific Ocean. Its destiny will be given shape when the two railroads now nearing completion reach the harbor and have settled down to transportation business.

It may not be uninteresting to know that Hoquiam and Gray's Harbor gave Hunt a bonus of one hundred and sixty thousand dollars: Aberdeen, one hundred and thirty thousand dollars; and Montesano, twenty-five thousand dollars. That is not the way pioneers used to begin life.

The resources of this valley, which includes the whole of Chehalis, a corner of Thurston, and the western end of Lewis Counties, are prodigious. In the first place, the coal-fields at its eastern end embrace one hundred and fifty thousand acres. The quality and reputation of lignite which attached to the Chehalis coal-fields for a long time militated against their development/, but enterprises of a few recent years have established the existence of a practically exhaustless body of clean bituminous coal in these fields, containing from ninety to ninety-five per cent, of carbon, in veins of a thickness of six feet, with a dip favorable to mining. Hence these railroads rivalling each other to cover this territory. And these coal-mines lie beneath a forest of merchantable timber. It will, no doubt, be a casus belli between the railroads,—the control of the transportation of coal and lumber from this favored section. But as the Pacific Ocean is only from eighty to one hundred and thirty miles from any of the coal-fields here referred to, Cray's Harbor has a great advantage over the Sound or Columbia River towns as a direct route to the sea, there being a saving in distance over the