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Two months hence it will be forty -nine years since I first saw Olympia. There were a few houses on the border of the bay; back of them the unbroken forest. This was an Indian country. By fully ten to one the number of Indians here and northward exceeded the whites. Indian canoes, to the number of thousands, cut these waters. Many hundreds of them I have seen drawn up here at Olympia at once; and many times great canoes from the north, each one carrying from forty to seventy natives, gay in their highly colored and parti-colored toggery, came up to Olympia, then the chief town, for trade or display. The white population of the town might have been 250. Roundabout the town were small agricultural settlements. Steilacoom was Olympia's rival, and, in my boyhood, I was accustomed to hear the champions of each hold forth in wordy and sometimes angry contention on the claims of each to present and coming greatness. In the scale of commercial importance Seattle was far below Olympia and Steilacoom, and Tacoma as yet was not even a name. There was a very small village at