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XXI

A TRIP TO SITKA 1840

WHEN Douglas and his crew and Rae and Eloise left Vancouver that March morning in 1840, they slid down the Columbia to the confluence of the Cowlitz. Entering this river, milky with volcanic ash from St. Helen's, they soon came to its headwaters and crossed overland on horses to Puget Sound. All the storied beauty of Scottish lakes, Italian skies, and Isles of Greece seemed centred here, on these unsung shores that commemorate the name and fame of Lieutenant Peter Puget. Here the little black "Beaver," the first steamer on Pacific waters, took them out on their northern journey.

For miles and miles, interlacing the northwest coast, rocky islands, like the summits of submerged mountains, hold their green fringes down to the sea. In serried rank, the Douglas spruce "the tree of Turner's dreams," the king of conifers, the great timber-tree of the world stands monarch of the hills. Once, twice, thrice, they ran up rivers where Hudson's Bay forts held subject the clans of red men. "Reports from these posts form the most agreeable part of my library," McLoughlin was wont to say.

One evening the little "Beaver "rounded a rocky point and, quite unexpectedly, the Bay of Sitka burst into view. Beside Mt. Edgecumbe it lay, dimpling in the sunset. A few Russian ships lay at anchor in the Norse-like fiord close under the guns of Sitka Cas