In to the Yukon

by William Seymour Edwards

Many fishing-boats were in the harbor and along the water-side, and many of the big sixty-foot canoes, dug out of a single immense log, paddled by Indians, were passing up and down the bay. Throughout the States of Washington and Oregon the Indians are the chief reliance of the hop growers for the picking of their crops, and every summer’s-end the various tribes along the coast gather to the work. They come from everywhere—from Vancouver’s Island, from British Columbia and even from Alaska. They voyage down the coast in their immense sea canoes, stop at the ports, or ascend the rivers, pushing as far as water will carry them. They bring the children and the old folks with them, they buy or hire horses, and they push hundreds of miles inland to the hop fields, where a merry holiday is made of the gathering of the hops. They were now returning, and many were passing through Tacoma. They were here outfitting, and spending their newly earned wages in buying all those useful and useless things an Indian wants—gay shawls and big ear-rings for the squaws, gaudy blankets, knives and guns for the bucks; even toys for the papooses. On the side the women were also selling baskets made in their seasons of leisure. In the shelter of the long pier one afternoon we came upon a group of several family canoes preparing for the long voyage to the north. A number of pale-face women were bargaining for baskets; one had just bought a toy canoe from an anxious mother, and I was fortunate in buying another. Near by a man was carefully cutting out the figures of a Totem pole. They were evidently from Alaska. Alaska and a thousand miles or more of sea lay between them and home. They looked like a group of Japanese and spoke in gutteral throat tones. The Indians we lately met at Yakima were wholly different, being redskins of the interior, not the light yellow of the coast. When in Caribou Crossing, old Bishop Bompas, who has spent more than forty years among the Indians of the north, told me that in his view the coast Indians had originally come over from North Asia and were allied to the Mongolian races, while he believed that the red-tinged, eagle-nosed Indian of the interior was of Malay origin and of a race altogether distinct. Be this as it may, the coast Indian, according to our preconceived ideas, is no Indian at all, but rather a bastard Jap. He fishes and hunts and works, and his labor is an important factor in solving the agricultural problems of the Pacific Coast. The enormous and profitable hop crops could not be gathered without him.

We had hoped while in Tacoma to have had the chance of visiting some of the primeval forest regions of the State, where the largest trees are yet in undisturbed growth, but the opportunity of taking advantage of a railway excursion to Yakima, there to see the State Fair, was too good to be lost, and we accordingly made that journey instead. Mr. S—— had joined us in Tacoma, so we four bought excursion tickets, and climbed into one of eleven packed passenger coaches of a Northern Pacific special, and made the trip. Eight hours of it, due east and southeast, across the snow-capped Cascade Mountains and down into the dry, arid Yakima River basin to the city—big village—of North Yakima. An arid valley, but yet green as an Irish hedge, a curious sight. The hills all round sere and brown, tufted and patched with dry buffalo grass and sage brush; the flat bottom lands mostly an emerald green; all this by irrigation, the first real irrigation I had yet seen. The river is robbed of its abundant waters, which are carried by innumerable ditches, and then again divided and sub-divided, until the whole level expanse of wide valley is soaked and drenched and converted into a smiling garden. Here and there a piece of land, unwatered, stretched brown and arid between the green.

North Yakima, named from the Indian tribe that still dwells hard by upon its reservation, is a thriving little place, the greenest lawns of the most velvety turf, roses and flowers abounding where the water comes. Trees shading its streets, which are bounded on each side by flowing gutters, and the driest, dustiest, vacant lots on earth. The fair is the annual State show of horses, cattle, sheep and fruits, and these we were glad to see. All fine, very fine, and such apples as I never before set eyes on. Thousands of boxes of Washington apples are now shipped to Chicago, and even to New York, so superior is their size and flavor.

Returning, we had an instance of the insolence of these great land grant fed railway corporations. While the Northern Pacific had advertised an excursion to Yakima and hauled eleven carloads of men, women and children to the fair, it yet made no extra provision to take them back, so that when next day several hundred were at the station in order to board the train for home, only a few dozen could get in, and the very many saw with dismay the train pull away without them! We had got into a sleeper on the rear, fortunately, and thus escaped another twelve hours in the overcrowded little town.

Yesterday we boarded the night express for Portland. The country between this city and Tacoma is said to be rough and unsettled, and not fit for even lumbering or present cultivation, so we did not regret the travel at night. On the other hand, we saw much fine forest in crossing the Cascade Mountains, although the finest timber in the State is, I am told, over in that northwestern peninsula on the slopes of the Olympia Mountains, between Puget Sound and the Pacific. There the trees grow big, very big, and thence come the more gigantic of the logs, fifty and one hundred feet long and ten to twenty-five feet in diameter at the butt.

MT. RANIER OR TACOMA.