OLD FAITHFUL, AT UPPER GEYSER BASIN. (SEE PAGE 36.)
Very fine crops are grown in the Spokane Valley. The crops of oats and wheat sown for hay was being harvested and proved a very heavy yield. Washington claims she will harvest over 20,000,000 bushels of wheat this year. I was surprised to see fine fields of grain on the rolling plains in the great bend of the Columbia river. I remember speaking of the richness of this soil in the "Race with the Sun," but thought artificial irrigation would be necessary to make it yield. This year there are fine crops where only nature's watering can ever be availed of. One of the stations, quite removed from any water course, has grown into a thriving town, showing that the country around is prosperous.
I suspect that a fair rainfall cannot be relied upon from year to year. It will, however, become more and more reliable, for it has been the rule throughout the world and probably through all ages, that rains follow cultivation, and man's presence and industry calls down Heaven's aid. The answer of Hercules to the cartman would be the reply of Ceres as well to the prayers of her votaries.
The ash colored sage bush was thought by the early men of the great plains to be poison to the land. It however was one of God's bounties to man. It prevented the soil from being blown away and where it grew the most lavishly, is now found to be the best of soils. Sage bush not only keeps the winds away, but when dead and rotten fills up sand pockets with material rich for all of the small grains. The people of the Yakima valley on the eastern slope of the Cascade mountains, boast that theirs is the garden spot of the Pacific country. They certainly do produce fine fruits, melons and garden vegetables, but I have not been struck favorably with the outlook of the locality in either of my trips through the land.
The run from Ellensburg over the Cascades is a magnificent ride. The enormous mass of forest, prevents many extended views, but those seen are very fine. Every break in the forests would reveal lofty mountains' slopes clothed in forests of marvelous richness, and now and then snowy heights would tower aloft. Once a fine view of Renier is caught, the monarch of the grand range. Robed in his snowy ermine he stands out a sceptered hermit wrapped in his isolation. Seen from the sound he is one of the most picturesque peaked mountains of the world, and from all inland points of view he is a grand towering mass of ever living snow and ice.
ARKANSAS HOT SPRINGS, RIVALED.
Having done considerable hard work on the trip so far, we resolved to take a rest at the hot springs, three and-a-half hours from Tacoma, on Green River. Three years ago my boys and I fished here pleasantly for several days. The place is unpretentious, but the waters possess apparently the same properties as those of the Arkansas hot springs. The place is some fourteen hundred and fifty feet above Tacoma. During our present three days stop, an overcoat has been comfortable in the evenings, and we sleep under three blankets. A cold batch of air drops down the valley from Mount Reniers (Tacoma calls him Mount Tacoma; Renier is his name), 14,400 feet of snowy peak, driving away all summer sultriness. A bath in the medicinal waters of seven minutes and then a pack causes the perspiration to flow from one quite as heavily as the same course would do in Arkansas. Before leaving home I had a large and painful carbuncle on the back of my neck. The sign of the cross was cut deeply into it, and as it healed it proved a nest-egg for several smaller jewels near by. These I cauterized with pure carbolic in the park, but still they annoyed me much. Four baths here have at least temporarily dried them up. Men who came here three or four weeks ago on crutches from rheumatism, are walking about freely and feel themselves able to buckle down to work.
A WONDERFUL GROWTH OF TIMBER.
A sight of the magnificent cedar and fir forests here would amply repay an Easterner for a day's stop-over. I have been among them before several times, yet at each visit they surprise me as they did at first. Fifty thousand shingles are made from a single cedar. I counted twenty-one firs on a space considerably less than a quarter of an acre. The owner, a sawyer, assured me they would cut over five thousand feet of board each. He owns a quarter of a section about his mill and expects to market 15,000,000 feet of lumber from his land. He said the railroad company had cut 30,000,000 feet from its right of way of 400 feet by ten miles in this locality. I saw on a quarter of an acre a cluster of twenty odd trees from four and-a-half feet to over six in diameter and 300 high. They ran up about 150 feet before reaching a limb. Mighty logs lie upon the ground so thickly that even a good woodsman can walk but little over a mile an hour. Cedar logs, moss-covered and sodden, stretch 100 feet in the tangled undergrowth, and have lain there so long that one often sees a fir tree, growing with its roots straddled over them 50 to 100 years old.