Page:History of Washington, Idaho, and Montana.djvu/13

Rh fish, bordered many miles wide with the most magnificent forests on earth. It did not require the imagination of a poet to picture a glowing future for Puget Sound, albeit far away in the dim reaches of time. To be in some measure connected with that future, to lay ever so humbly the corner-stone, was worth all the toil and privation, the danger and the isolation, incident to its achievement.

Not only was there this inland sea, with its treasures inexhaustible of food for the world, and its fifteen hundred miles of shore covered with pine forests to the water's edge, but surrounding it were many small valleys of the richest soils, watered by streams fed by the pure snows of the Cascade and Coast ranges, half prairie and half forest, warm, sheltered from winds, enticing the weary pilgrim from the eastern side of the continent to rest in their calm solitudes. It was true that the native wild man still inhabited these valleys and roamed the encircling mountains, to the number of thirty thousand; but in so vast a country three times as many would have seemed few; and the incomers were the sons of sires who had met and subdued the savage tribes of America as they pushed their way westward from Plymouth Rock to the Missouri and beyond; therefore they had no hesitation now in settling in their midst. They had been bred to the belief that "the British and Indians" would melt before them.

The sources of material for writing this volume are similar to those which have enabled me to write all my volumes; namely, all existing printed matter, books, public documents, and newspapers, together