My spirits rise,
For they’ve gone back to their paradise.
[Ballast isle is the camping spot near Seattle of the Indians during their stop over to and from the hop fields.]
Hop picking on bright days in the valleys of Western Washington is the delight of the native. It is for him and all his kith and kin, a joy unspeakable. He comes from near and far. He will travel hundreds of miles in his big canim with his full household and all his earthly possessions to enjoy the delightful season as much for his real love for it as for the money that he knows will always come at the close. Then the hop field is redolent of perfume and melody. The fields are alive with pickers; the air is joyous with sound. There is a richness and coloring in the surrounding which form a perpetual delight. There is a novelty to the beholder and a rurality of scene so peculiar, that makes one feel as if they were in some enchanted country. If you have never witnessed a season of hop picking you have missed a rare old time-treat which has its equal only in the maple woods of the East during sugar making time, or in the co’n shuckin’ days of old Kentuck, “when the mast am fallin’ and the darkies am a singin’ and raccoon and possum am simmerin’ in the pot.”
In addition to its scenic beauties and pleasant surroundings a hop field is a sanitarium for the invalid, and a resting place for the weary and overworked.
Ranking next to the delightful exhilarating smell of the fresh pine woods of Puget Sound is the rich agreeable odor of the hop fields. The hazy half humid air of the lazy September days, the variegated coloring of thousands of native pickers chattering in their gutteral Chinook; the heavy foliaged banks of deep, intensely green fields of vines, with the equally deep green of the conifera woods in the background; the white canvas tents, the lines of curling smoke ascending heavenward; the half agreeable smell of frying salmon, the universal meal of the brownskinned Indians; the mingling and assimilation of a thousand rural and novel et ceteras, form pictures and attractions seen no where else on earth save in a Washington hop field. They are delights which enjoyed once, never are obliterated from the pleasant memories of the beholder.
AN EDUCATED INDIAN
There is not a rural panacea or health resort from Southern California to Vancouver island that will afford a tithe of the good solid enjoyment with the revivifying influence so beneficial to constitutions or shattered nerves.