Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 29).djvu/96

 and Admiralty Inlet cultivate potatoes principally, which are extremely fine, and raised in great abundance, and now constitute a large portion of their food.[108]

At Nisqually the Hudson's Bay Company had fine crops of wheat, oats, peas, potatoes, &c. The wheat, it was supposed, would yield fifteen bushels to the acre. The farm has been two years under cultivation, and is principally intended for a grazing and dairy farm. They have now seventy milch cows, and make butter, &c., to supply their contract with the Russians.

{299} The Cowelitz farm is also in the western section. The produce of wheat is good—about twenty bushels to the acre. The ground, however, has just been brought under cultivation. The Company have here six hundred acres, which are situated on the Cowelitz river, about thirty miles from the Columbia, and on the former are erecting a saw and grist mill. The farm is finely situated, and the harvest of 1841 produced seven thousand bushels of wheat.[109]

Several Canadians are also established here, who told me that they succeeded well with but little work. They have erected buildings, live comfortably, and work small farms of fifty acres.

I was told that the stock on these farms did not thrive so well as elsewhere. There are no low prairie grounds on the river in this vicinity, and it is too far for them to