The timber and fisheries were a boundless source of wealth in evidence.
As early as 1847, a sawmill run with power afforded by the falls of the Des Chutes at Tumwater, furnished lumber to settlers as a means of profit.
The first cargo was taken by the brig Orbit in 1850, to San Francisco, she being the first American merchant vessel in the carrying trade of Puget Sound. The brig George Emory followed suit; each carried a return cargo of goods for trade with the settlers and Indians.
At first the forest-fallers had no oxen to drag the timbers, after they were hewn, to the water’s edge, but rolled and hauled them by hand as far as practicable. It was in this manner that the brig Leonesa was loaded with piles at Alki in the winter of 1851-2, by the Dennys, Terry, Low, Boren and Bell.
Lee Terry brought a yoke of oxen to complete the work of loading, from Puyallup, on the beach, as there was no road through the heavy forest.
Several ships were loaded at Port Townsend, where the possession of three yoke of oxen gave them a decided advantage.
One ship, the G. W. Kendall, was sent from San Francisco to Puget Sound for ice. It is needless to say the captain did not get a cargo of that luxury; he reported that water did not freeze in Puget Sound and consoled the owner of the ship by returning with a valuable cargo of piles.
The cutting of logs to build houses and the grubbing of stumps to clear the land for gardens alternated with the cutting of piles. In the clearing of land, the Indians proved a great assistance; far from being lazy many of them were hard workers and would dig and delve day after day to remove the immense stumps of cedar and fir left after cutting the great trees. The settlers burned many by piling heaps of logs and brush on them, others by boring holes far into the wood and setting fire, while some were rent by charges of powder when it could be afforded.
The clearing of land in this heavily timbered country was an item of large expense if hired, otherwise of much arduous toil for the owner. The women and children often helped to pile brush and set fires and many a merry party turned out at night to “chunk up” the blazing heaps; after nightfall, their fire-lit figure flitting hither and yon against the purple darkness, suggested well-intentioned witches.
Cutting down the tall trees, from two hundred fifty to four hundred fifty feet, required considerable care and skill. Sometimes we felt the pathos of it all, when a huge giant, the dignified product of patient centuries of growth, fell crashing, groaning to the earth. This side of the subject, is presented in a poem “The Lone Fir Tree,” not included in this volume.