A Summer's Outing, and The Old Man's Story

by Carter H. Harrison

We were pleased to find among the guests of the springs one of Chicago's fairest daughters, now living at Tacoma, whose pulled-candy tresses three years ago out-glistened the fiber of her bridal veil, and whose eyes are bluer than the turquoise in her talismanic ring. I like little unpretentious Green River, Hot Springs, even if its table is not of the Delmonico order.

MALT LIQUORS IN THE ORIGINAL PACKAGE.

A pretty drop of fourteen hundred and odd feet through wild rocky gorges and thickly treed glades, along the rapid green waters of the river, in which trout abound, between lofty heights, brought us to the world-famous hop yards of the Puyallup Valley. What masses of green lift upon the closely-set hop-poles! I involuntarily cried "Prosit und Gesundheit" as we whizzed through them. Twenty-three or four years ago, the first hop root was planted in the soil of this marvelous valley. Now in this valley and others in this locality, two hundred and fifty thousand acres are giving forth each year crops unknown in any other hop land. Two thousand pounds to the acre are not unusual, and some yields have been nearly if not quite double that. Thousands of barrels of malt liquors were green about us in original packages.

When we alighted at Tacoma, from which I date this letter, I was most agreeably surprised to find that Mr. Winston and his two fair daughters were on the same train. They had intended going with us into the Yellowstone Park, but were unavoidably detained. They have done the Park more rapidly than we did and here overtook us. To-morrow we will be fellow-passengers for Uncle Sam's ice-bound Eldorado, Alaska. Tacoma has been and is growing with great rapidity. A great suburb covers a wide slope on the upper end of the town, which at night, when I was here three years ago, had the appearance of a Titanic camp-fire. Fires gleamed along great logs; fires burnt on sides and tops of lofty stumps, and fires belched forth from burning trees fifty and more feet from the ground. Diagonal auger holes had been bored near the root into the heart of a tree. Two holes meet at the heart thus causing a draught. Fire was put in, igniting the inflammable pitch, always richest near the ground. It then bored its way up the heart to break out as from a flue, often a hundred feet from the roots.

Tacoma was a cluster of shanties with a small population, barely among the thousands, seven years ago. It was a dusty, scattered, ungainly big village of 12,000 three years ago. Now the census gives it about 40,000 population. The Northern Pacific company is filling the five-mile flat marsh along the Puyallup River which empties into the bay, in front of the town. A large part of this belongs to the Indian Reservation, and is covered by several feet of water during the high tides, which come up the Sound. The filling is being done by a powerful pumping dredge, which pours each day a vast quantity of sand and silt from the deeper part of the river upon the flats to be filled. My friends Christy and Wise of the Illinois Club, Chicago, are part owners of the powerful dredge, and I suspect are making a big thing of it. The reclaimed land will, when high and dry, be worth millions, and will be the seat of the best business portion of the future city. The generous way in which this great railroad company has taken possession of and is appropriating the fat of this place reminds one forcibly of what is or may be going on in a city between this and the Atlantic. Columbian World's Fair Commissioners, Directors, and City Councils may possibly be sometimes just a little too generous, as Congresses are and have been. The people may sometimes permit their patriotic fervor to make them somewhat unobservant of the wide reach and tenacious grasp of monopoly. Corporations are said to have no souls. Railroad corporations are as voracious as their iron horses and have consciences as cold as their iron rails.

The big hotel here is now crowded with travelers, the most of them just returned from or about to sail for Alaska. Cots are doubled up in many rooms. The wide veranda, overlooking the sound, last night was full of gay promenaders from many quarters of the Union; they enjoyed very fair music from the house band, while they watched with delight the unique spectacle of what appeared to be a new moon arising in the east with its crescent bent downward instead of upward. Fair Luna arose to us immediately over the sharp rounded pinnacle of lofty Mount Tacoma. She presented a narrow silver crescent—a mere thread at first, but waxing by a rapid crescendo movement, she showed her first, her second, and her third quarter, and then her full rounded self in all of her cold glory many degrees up in the sky. The proud mountain having played his short role of eclipsing a planet at once sank into gray nothingness. It seemed a pity the moon's movement was so rapid. She is a cold, fickle jade and is said to be from rim to core hard in eternal frost. It was but fitting she should rest awhile on yonder pinnacled home of eternal ice and snow.

During the afternoon of yesterday after our arrival, all of the mountain's lower mass, more than two-thirds of its height, was absolutely invisible, veiled in translucent, unclouded haze. No one could have guessed a mountain was there, but high up some four to five thousand feet of his ice-locked lofty summit hung like a gigantic balloon, thinly silvered and delicately burnished, floating on airy nothingness some ten degrees above the horizon. To those who have never seen this effect of a snow-clad mountain, the picture was startling and to all was weird in the extreme. Few mountain chiefs in the world are seen to such advantage as Tacoma from this point on a clear day. The beholder standing on a level of the sea sees the whole of the cone in all of the majesty of fourteen thousand four hundred and odd feet, over 6,000 feet of this being clothed in eternal snow. We were lucky in seeing the floating summit yesterday, for a change of wind has since then brought the smoke from forest fires down into the valley to-day, and a compass is necessary to fix the great mountain's exact location. He may keep himself impenetrably veiled for several weeks. If I be not mistaken, I was told he was invisible last year for nearly if not quite three months.

Mr. Clint Snowden, the Secretary of the Board of Trade, has been our cicerone, as the board was our host, in showing us about the city to-day. Its growth one could scarcely comprehend from the information as the increase of population. Seeing has shown the naked truth. The great kindness to me in the past of friends in Seattle has made me rather a Seattler. But I tremble lest it may not be able to keep pace with its pushing rival. Will the country be able to support two big cities? I have great faith in the country. Three years ago I said there would be a mighty empire along the Pacific slope—that is, a mighty part of the great Nation of the continent. Each visit here more and more impresses me that my prophecy will be fulfilled. I recalled the fact that we once thought it an outrage that "the Father of his country" should have his state-namesake off in an out of the way corner of the country, and that corner a mountainous mass of worthless land; but now one can realize that Washington will be the most picturesque state in the Union, and when America becomes densely populated, it will be one of the richest. The yield of all kinds; lumber, coal, hops, wheat and oats, fish and fruits will this year equal that of many of the eastern states. The state will ere many years have gone by, prove a magnificent namesake of the Father of his country.

Dust is one of the most serious impedimenta of the Pacific slope; for three months of the year it makes one's throat and lungs a sort of mortar bed, but the soil which so easily turns to impalable powder and in such quantities as to be almost solid along some of the roads, is of marvelous richness. The trees are nearly as imposing monarchs as are the mountains; the flowers are as beautiful as the rivers are clear and pearly; the fruits are glorious and the climate is delicious. Though the noon-day sun is so hot as to make a broad-brimmed hat or an umbrella a necessity, yet the nights are so cold that one gets chilled under less than three blankets. Speaking of fruits, we must say that excepting in the Caucasus the world has no equal for the cherries of this locality—so pulpy and so big. A peddler selling some, captured his purchaser when he cried out: "But, then, sir; them's cherries, not apples." While writing this the sun marches deeply into the West. We must soon board the steamer which sails before day to-morrow.