PUGET SOUND TO SAN FRANCISCO.
Captain George Vancouver, already referred to, who named Vancouver Island, had among his officers a Lieutenant Puget. From him came the name of Puget Sound, stretching eighty miles southward from Vancouver Island and the Strait of Juan de Fuca into Washington State, ramifying into many bays and inlets, and having numerous islands. The Sound covers two thousand square miles and has eighteen hundred miles of coast line, being a splendid inland sea with admirable harbors. Its peculiar configuration makes very high tides, sometimes reaching twelve to eighteen feet. At the entrance near the head of the Strait of Juan de Fuca is the United States port of entry, Port Townsend, in a picturesque situation with the large graystone Custom House on the bluff, a conspicuous structure. Three formidable forts, Wilson, Casey and Flagler, guard the entrance from the sea. Opposite, on the eastern shore of the Sound, is Everett with a fine harbor, the terminal of the Great Northern Railway. To the northwest, a sentinel outpost of the Cascade Range, rises Mount Baker, nearly eleven thousand feet high. To the southward, on the circling shores of Elliott Bay, is Seattle, named after an Indian chief and founded in 1852, built on a series of terraces rising above the water, the chief commercial city of Puget Sound, and having sixty thousand population. On the southeastern arm of the Sound, called Commencement Bay, is Tacoma, the terminal of the Northern Pacific Railway, with fifty thousand people. Its Indian name comes from its great lion, Mount Tacoma (sometimes called Rainier), a giant of the Cascades, rising fourteen thousand five hundred and twenty feet, and in full view to the southeast of the city. Fourteen glaciers flow down its sides, the chief one, Nisqually Glacier, seven miles long, on the southern slope, being considered the finest on the coast south of Alaska. This mountain, like other peaks of the Cascades, is an extinct volcano, its crater still emitting sulphurous fumes and heat. Mount St. Helens, not far away, which was in eruption in 1898, is regarded as the most active volcano in the range, its massive rounded dome rising over nine thousand feet. Across on the southwestern shore of Puget Sound is the capital of Washington State, Olympia, with five thousand people.
Portland, the chief town of Oregon, is but a short distance south of Puget Sound, on the Willamette River, twelve miles from its confluence with the Columbia, and at the head of deep-sea navigation, one hundred and ten miles from the ocean. This is the leading business centre of the Pacific northwest, having seventy thousand people and extensive trade. It is finely situated, and from the heights on its western border is given a most superb view of the Cascades, the range grandly stretching over a hundred miles. The Mazama Club of earnest mountain explorers at Portland have done much to make known to the world the scenery and grandeur of these attractive mountains. Fifteen miles up the Willamette, at Oregon City, are the Falls, where that river descends forty feet in a splendid horseshoe cataract, displaying great beauty and furnishing valuable power. To the southward is Salem, on the Willamette, the capital of Oregon, having five thousand population. The "Oregon trail," as the route from San Francisco into this region was called, ascends the Rogue River, so named from the Indians of the region, crosses the Siskiyou Mountain, and descends on the southern side to the headwaters of the Sacramento. To the eastward, near the California boundary, high up in the Cascades, is the strangely constructed Crater Lake. It is at over sixty-two hundred feet elevation, and occupies an abyss produced by the subsidence of an enormous volcano, being six miles long and four wide. A perpendicular rocky wall one to two thousand feet high entirely surrounds it, and the water, without outlet or apparent inflow, is fully two thousand feet deep and densely blue in color. In the centre is Wizard Island, rising eight hundred and fifty feet, an extinct volcanic cone, thus presenting one crater within another. The district containing this wonderful lake has been made a reservation called the Oregon National Park. Some distance to the southward, the whole country being mountainous and the lower slopes covered with forests of splendid pines, is the grand snow-covered dome of Mount Shasta, one of the noblest of the Cascades (in California called the Coast Range), rising fourteen thousand four hundred and forty feet, a huge extinct volcano, having a crater in its western peak twenty-five hundred feet deep and three-quarters of a mile wide. Beyond, the Sacramento Valley stretches far away southward, passing Chico and Marysville, to Sacramento. It was to the eastward, near Coloma, that the first discovery of California gold was made in February, 1848, on the farm of Colonel Sutter, the county having been appropriately named El Dorado.
SAN FRANCISCO BAY AND CITY.
The San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers, having united, flow westward into Suisun Bay, thence by a strait to the circular and expansive San Pablo Bay, which in turn empties into San Francisco Bay. On the strait connecting Suisun and San Pablo Bays is Benicia, where lived the famous pugilist John C. Heenan, the "Benicia Boy," and the immense forge-hammer he wielded is on exhibition there. At the head of San Pablo Bay is Napa, or Mare Island, the location of the Navy Yard. Upon the mainland opposite is Vallejo, whence a railway runs up the fertile Napa Valley, through orchards and vineyards and among mineral springs, to Calistoga. Near here is the strange Petrified Forest, where there are scattered upon a tract of four square miles the remains of a hundred petrified trees. The Bay of San Francisco is a magnificent inland sea, fifty miles long and ten miles wide, connected with the Pacific Ocean by the strait of the Golden Gate, five miles long and a mile wide. The bay is separated from the ocean by a long peninsula, having the city of San Francisco on the inside of its northern extremity. Over opposite, on the eastern shore of the bay, is Oakland, the terminal of the Southern Pacific Railway routes from the East, a city of fifty thousand people, named from the numerous live-oaks growing in its gardens and along the streets. It has extensive manufactures and a magnificent view over the expansive bay and city of San Francisco and the distant Golden Gate, where the enclosing rocky shores can be seen rising boldly, the northern side to two thousand feet height. In the Oakland suburbs is Berkeley, where are some of the College buildings of the University of California, founded in 1868 and having twenty-three hundred students, many of them women. The attractive grounds cover two hundred and fifty acres, and the endowments exceed $8,000,000. South of Oakland is the pleasant suburban town of Alameda. On the western shore of the bay, south of San Francisco, is Menlo Park, a favorite place of rural residence for the wealthy San Francisco people, having many handsome villas and estates with noble trees. Here is Palo Alto or the "tall tree," taking its name from a fine redwood tree near the railway, an estate of over eight thousand acres, which is the location of the noted Leland Stanford, Jr., University. This is the greatest educational endowment in America, having a fund of over $30,000,000, the gift of Senator and Mrs. Leland Stanford in memory of their only son. The University has twelve hundred students, many being women. The buildings, which in a manner reproduce the architecture of the ancient Spanish Missions, are of buff sandstone, surmounted by red-tiled roofs, picturesquely contrasting with the oaks and eucalyptus trees which are so numerous and the many tropical plants that have been brought there. The Palo Alto estate is one of the great California stock-farms.
Two Franciscan monks in 1776 founded on this famous bay the Indian Mission of San Francisco de Assis, often called the Mission Dolores, and in course of time there started upon the shore, which had much wild mint growing about, the village of Yerba Buena, named from it the "good herb." Just about the time this lonely little village had got a small Spanish population and built a few houses, Richard Henry Dana came into the bay in 1835 on the voyage which he so pleasantly recounts in Two Years Before the Mast. He then prophetically wrote: "If ever California becomes a prosperous country, this bay will be the centre of its prosperity. The abundance of wood and water; the extreme fertility of its shores; the excellence of its climate, which is as near to being perfect as any in the world; and its facilities for navigation affording the best anchoring-grounds in the whole Western coast of America, all fit it for a place of great importance." In the summer of 1846, during the Mexican War, the American navy made various important occupations on the California coasts, and a man-of-war came into San Francisco Bay and took possession for the United States. The next year the name of the village was changed to San Francisco. There were about six hundred inhabitants here when gold was discovered in 1848, and most of them at once left for the gold-fields; but the favorable location for trade soon attracted a large population and an extensive commerce. The young city had the usual mishaps from fires, suffering from a half-dozen serious conflagrations in its early career; while the peculiar character of the population made it then so lawless that twice the better element had to take summary control of the municipal government by "Vigilance Committees," who did not hesitate to promptly execute notorious criminals. There are now three hundred and fifty thousand people, the heterogeneous population including almost every nationality in the world.
San Francisco is in a fine situation on the shore of the bay and the steep hills to the westward, and is gradually spreading across the peninsula towards the ocean. It is, in fact, built on a succession of hills, of which a group extends westward from the bay, varying in height from less than two hundred to over nine hundred feet. Conspicuous among them are the Telegraph Hill, Nob Hill, Park Peak, the Mission Peaks and others. For the purpose of readily climbing these hills, the cable street railway and its peculiar "grip" were invented and first put into successful operation, and a British visitor writes of San Francisco that "one of its most characteristic sights is the cable cars crawling up the steep inclines like flies on a window-pane." The country around is treeless, with little fertile land, owing to the copious rivers of sand which steadily flow over it, being blown from the seashore by the strong westerly trade-winds. Thus have naturally come the historical San Francisco "sand lots," the scene of public meetings and not infrequent disturbances in former times. An immense amount of grading, cutting down hills, filling gullies, and reclamations of overflowed lands was necessary in building the city; and over $50,000,000 has been expended in improving the site which, as nature fashioned it, was so illy fitted for a city. The great charm is the spacious bay environed by mountains, furnishing such an admirable harbor, and across it the ferry steamers ply in all directions. Upon it, guarding the Golden Gate entrance, are Alcatraz Island, Goat Island and Angel Island, strongly fortified, while Fort Mason is on the heights north of the city, overlooking the famous strait. The charming waters of the noble bay are thus rhythmically described by Ada Abbott Dunton:
"How beautiful the waters of the Bay
Lie shimmering, gem-embossed and turquoise-blue,
Rippling and twinkling! Emerald shores in view