Page:The Overland Monthly, Jan-June 1894.djvu/236

172 spirit craved for it. The malice of enemies assailed him, and he was called to Washington, D. C., to answer charges preferred against him. While he was there the custom-house records were seized by citizens of the rival town, Port Townsend. On Smith's return in a revenue cutter, he demanded their surrender at the mouth of the cannon, and conveyed them back.

A season of rain followed. Streams fed by the mighty Olympic Mountains, back of the town, overflowed their banks, surged through the village, and washed the frail lumber custom-house out into the harbor, where for several days it sailed around, an ark without a dove. Enterprising Port Townsend landed the coveted prize, and made it securely hers by an order from government.

Meantime Victor Smith had perished in the Brother Jonathan, wrecked off the Californian coast. Its able supporter dead, its subsistence as^a port of customs lured away, pretty little Angeles was a deserted village, her harbor of refuge was unruffled, and only the voice of birds echoed among her forest aisles.

In the year 1886 yet another freak of fate came to her in the founding of a cooperative colony by George Venable Smith, who looked upon this federal townsite as especially adapted to putting his communistic ideas to the test. He worked up a membership of 2,000, raised capital to launch his colony by subscription and a membership fee, then proceeded with a thousand colonists to Port Angeles, where, under the name of "Puget Sound Co-operative Colony," they started eleven industries, and for a season prospered. Labor rather than capital was made the basis of their operaions. In this Port of the Angels money was not plenty; the colonists rose above the money question, however, by making a legal tender of their own, a paper currency valuable in general merchandise at the colony stores.

This associated partnership attracted to the colony malcontents and radicals of every kind. An unhealthy feeling existed, from which sprang up sects of free-thinkers, free-lovers, agnostics, anarchists, the most promiscuous element of outcast society ever banded together in any land. Two years later as a natural result the colony was broken up by internal dissensions. The discontented colonists departed; the property reverted to those who had the hardihood to remain, and passed from co-operation to a corporation. A railroad that never came was her next excitement. Rumor proclaimed that Angeles would be the coast terminus of the Union Pacific. Again a motley crew of that scourge of the West, the town boomer, invaded her port to angle for the biggest fish. Then ensued such a varied career as no town of its size can boast. Only a portion of the original government townsite had been platted into town lots; the remainder, 4,000 acres, extending back from the harbor into the forest and hills, was unsurveyed, and settlement could not be made upon it. The ax of the homeseekers waited the action government could not be brought to take, till desperate with deferred hope, patience exhausted, with one concerted movement they rose in their might, formed a squatters' association, advanced, and in July, 1890, jumped the reserve. The ringing blow of the ax, the crash of falling trees, the buzzing saw, animated the solitude where these people toiled on, till 2,000 rude little cabin homes rose up in a wilderness of pine and cedar. And how they worked! With a faith that government would hear their call as honest settlers and legalize their act,—as it did in accord with their demands.

To hasten the survey and appraisement of the entire townsite, Secretary Noble, while on a visit to the coast over a year ago, was induced to come to this town. A strange scene spread before him: the woods were full of men felling