Page:Washington, A Guide to the Evergreen State.djvu/39

4 with cascading waterfalls, and clear alpine lakes, mirroring snow-capped peaks and tree-lined shores. He can scale rugged mountains or traverse blue-white glaciers, made dangerous by deep crevasses. He can find many a secluded lake or stream or saltwater channel, where he can test his skill with rod and reel; he can try his luck at bagging a deer, a bear, or a cougar in the pathless wilds. He can drive through deep canyons or along surf-pounded beaches; he can pilot his motorboat through the maze of channels of Puget Sound, or sail before a spanking breeze among hundreds of enchanting islands.

Interesting, too, are the historic relies of the conquest of this wilderness: early mission houses, forts, blockhouses, and other pioneer buildings; the crumbling tombstones in lonely prairie cemeteries; markers on old trails; war canoes, tomahawks, arrowheads, feathered head-dresses, and other mementos of the culture of the Indians, whose descendants now live on reservations. All these are a part of the great epic of the march of the pioneer. To see them is to gain a clearer understanding of the history of the Nation.

In the course of the rapid development of the State, the country has been greatly altered. Forests have been cut, leaving vast searred and denuded areas; grasslands have been broken and planted to wheat; and the arid range, now the feeding ground of cattle and sheep, has been enclosed with barbed-wire fences. Desert lands have been converted by means of irrigation into productive gardens, orchards, and alfalfa tracts. Trains and automobiles now speed where native trails once ran, steamships and ferries ply waters formerly crossed only by primitive dugouts, and airplanes hum overhead. Factories and mills stand where Indians set their weirs; and on the sites of communal Indian villages, large modern cities, with clean, well-lighted streets and tree-lined boulevards, have been built.

On every side lies tangible evidence of the toll that this general and haphazard development of the country has taken; but works designed for the conservation and reclamation of depleted resources are also to be met with everywhere. Selective logging methods have supplanted to a considerable extent the wasteful methods of former years, and a carefully planned system of reforestation of logged-off and burned-over lands, in conjunction with the establishing of extensive national forests, bears promise of the intelligent utilization of existing stands of timber and the partial replacement of those that have been removed. The mighty Grand Coulee Dam and other major power developments, such as the Bonneville, the Skagit, and the Cushman