When we force our way into the depths of the forests, following any of
the rivers back to their fountains, we find that the bulk of the woods
is made up of the Douglas spruce (_Pseudotsuga Douglasii_), named in
honor of David Douglas, an enthusiastic botanical explorer of early
Hudson’s Bay times. It is not only a very large tree but a very
beautiful one, with lively bright-green drooping foliage, handsome
pendent cones, and a shaft exquisitely straight and regular. For so
large a tree it is astonishing how many find nourishment and space to
grow on any given area. The magnificent shafts push their spires into
the sky close together with as regular a growth as that of a
well-tilled field of grain. And no ground has been better tilled for
the growth of trees than that on which these forests are growing. For
it has been thoroughly ploughed and rolled by the mighty glaciers from
the mountains, and sifted and mellowed and outspread in beds hundreds
of feet in depth by the broad streams that issued from their fronts at
the time of their recession, after they had long covered all the land.
The largest tree of this species that I have myself measured was nearly
twelve feet in diameter at a height of five feet from the ground, and,
as near as I could make out under the circumstances, about three
hundred feet in length. It stood near the head of the Sound not far
from Olympia. I have seen a few others, both near the coast and thirty
or forty miles back in the interior, that were from eight to ten feet
in diameter, measured above their bulging insteps; and many from six to
seven feet. I have heard of some that were said to be three hundred and
twenty-five feet in height and fifteen feet in diameter, but none that
I measured were so large, though it is not at all unlikely that such
colossal giants do exist where conditions of soil and exposure are
surpassingly favorable. The average size of all the trees of this
species found up to an elevation on the mountain slopes of, say, two
thousand feet above sea level, taking into account only what may be
called mature trees two hundred and fifty to five hundred years of age,
is perhaps, at a vague guess, not more than a height of one hundred and
seventy-five or two hundred feet and a diameter of three feet; though,
of course, throughout the richest sections the size is much greater.
In proportion to its weight when dry, the timber from this tree is
perhaps stronger than that of any other conifer in the country. It is
tough and durable and admirably adapted in every way for shipbuilding,
piles, and heavy timbers in general. But its hardness and liability to
warp render it much inferior to white or sugar pine for fine work. In
the lumber markets of California it is known as “Oregon pine” and is
used almost exclusively for spars, bridge timbers, heavy planking, and
the framework of houses.
The same species extends northward in abundance through British
Columbia and southward through the coast and middle regions of Oregon
and California. It is also a common tree in the cañons and hollows of
the Wahsatch Mountains in Utah, where it is called “red pine” and on
portions of the Rocky Mountains and some of the short ranges of the
Great Basin. Along the coast of California it keeps company with the
redwood wherever it can find a favorable opening. On the western slope
of the Sierra, with the yellow pine and incense cedar, it forms a
pretty well-defined belt at a height of from three thousand to six
thousand feet above the sea, and extends into the San Gabriel and San
Bernardino Mountains in Southern California. But, though widely
distributed, it is only in these cool, moist northlands that it reaches
its finest development, tall, straight, elastic, and free from limbs to
an immense height, growing down to tide water, where ships of the
largest size may lie close alongside and load at the least possible
cost.
Growing with the Douglas we find the white spruce, or “Sitka pine,” as
it is sometimes called. This also is a very beautiful and majestic
tree, frequently attaining a height of two hundred feet or more and a
diameter of five or six feet. It is very abundant in southeastern
Alaska, forming the greater part of the best forests there. Here it is
found mostly around the sides of beaver-dam and other meadows and on
the borders of the streams, especially where the ground is low. One
tree that I saw felled at the head of the Hop-Ranch meadows on the
upper Snoqualmie River, though far from being the largest I have seen,
measured a hundred and eighty feet in length and four and a half in
diameter, and was two hundred and fifty-seven years of age.
In habit and general appearance it resembles the Douglas spruce, but it
is somewhat less slender and the needles grow close together all around
the branchlets and are so stiff and sharp-pointed on the younger
branches that they cannot well be handled without gloves. The timber is
tough, close-grained, white, and looks more like pine than any other of
the spruces. It splits freely, makes excellent shingles and in general
use in house-building takes the place of pine. I have seen logs of this
species a hundred feet long and two feet in diameter at the upper end.
It was named in honor of the old Scotch botanist Archibald Menzies, who
came to this coast with Vancouver in 1792[23].
The beautiful hemlock spruce with its warm yellow-green foliage is also
common in some portions of these woods. It is tall and slender and
exceedingly graceful in habit before old age comes on, but the timber
is inferior and is seldom used for any other than the roughest work,
such as wharf-building.
The Western arbor-vitæ[24] (_Thuja gigantea_) grows to a size truly
gigantic on low rich ground. Specimens ten feet in diameter and a
hundred and forty feet high are not at all rare. Some that I have heard
of are said to be fifteen and even eighteen feet thick. Clad in rich,
glossy plumes, with gray lichens covering their smooth, tapering boles,
perfect trees of this species are truly noble objects and well worthy
the place they hold in these glorious forests. It is of this tree that
the Indians make their fine canoes.
Of the other conifers that are so happy as to have place here, there
are three firs, three or four pines, two cypresses, a yew, and another
spruce, the _Abies Pattoniana_[25]. This last is perhaps the most
beautiful of all the spruces, but, being comparatively small and
growing only far back on the mountains, it receives but little
attention from most people. Nor is there room in a work like this for
anything like a complete description of it, or of the others I have
just mentioned. Of the three firs, one (_Picea grandis_)[26], grows
near the coast and is one of the largest trees in the forest, sometimes
attaining a height of two hundred and fifty feet. The timber, however,
is inferior in quality and not much sought after while so much that is
better is within reach. One of the others (_P. amabilis_, var.
_nobilis_) forms magnificent forests by itself at a height of about
three thousand to four thousand feet above the sea. The rich plushy,
plumelike branches grow in regular whorls around the trunk, and on the
topmost whorls, standing erect, are the large, beautiful cones. This is
far the most beautiful of all the firs. In the Sierra Nevada it forms a
considerable portion of the main forest belt on the western slope, and
it is there that it reaches its greatest size and greatest beauty. The
third species (_P. subalpina_) forms, together with _Abies Pattoniana_,
the upper edge of the timberline on the portion of the Cascades
opposite the Sound. A thousand feet below the extreme limit of tree
growth it occurs in beautiful groups amid parklike openings where
flowers grow in extravagant profusion.
The pines are nowhere abundant in the State. The largest, the yellow
pine (_Pinus ponderosa_), occurs here and there on margins of dry
gravelly prairies, and only in such situations have I yet seen it in
this State. The others (_P. monticola_ and _P. contorta_) are mostly
restricted to the upper slopes of the mountains, and though the former
of these two attains a good size and makes excellent lumber, it is
mostly beyond reach at present and is not abundant. One of the
cypresses (_Cupressus Lawsoniana_)[27] grows near the coast and is a
fine large tree, clothed like the arbor-vitae in a glorious wealth of
flat, feathery branches. The other is found here and there well up
toward the edge of the timberline. This is the fine Alaska cedar (_C.
Nootkatensis_), the lumber from which is noted for its durability,
fineness of grain, and beautiful yellow color, and for its fragrance,
which resembles that of sandalwood. The Alaska Indians make their canoe
paddles of it and weave matting and coarse cloth from the fibrous brown
bark.
Among the different kinds of hardwood trees are the oak, maple,
madrona, birch, alder, and wild apple, while large cottonwoods are
common along the rivers and shores of the numerous lakes.
The most striking of these to the traveler is the Menzies arbutus, or
madrona, as it is popularly called in California. Its curious red and
yellow bark, large thick glossy leaves, and panicles of waxy-looking
greenish-white urn-shaped flowers render it very conspicuous. On the
boles of the younger trees and on all the branches, the bark is so
smooth and seamless that it does not appear as bark at all, but rather
the naked wood. The whole tree, with the exception of the larger part
of the trunk, looks as though it had been thoroughly peeled. It is
found sparsely scattered along the shores of the Sound and back in the
forests also on open margins, where the soil is not too wet, and
extends up the coast on Vancouver Island beyond Nanaimo. But in no part
of the State does it reach anything like the size and beauty of
proportions that it attains in California, few trees here being more
than ten or twelve inches in diameter and thirty feet high. It is,
however, a very remarkable-looking object, standing there like some
lost or runaway native of the tropics, naked and painted, beside that
dark mossy ocean of northland conifers. Not even a palm tree would seem
more out of place here.
The oaks, so far as my observation has reached, seem to be most
abundant and to grow largest on the islands of the San Juan and Whidbey
Archipelago. One of the three species of maples that I have seen is
only a bush that makes tangles on the banks of the rivers. Of the other
two one is a small tree, crooked and moss-grown, holding out its leaves
to catch the light that filters down through the close-set spires of
the great spruces. It grows almost everywhere throughout the entire
extent of the forest until the higher slopes of the mountains are
reached, and produces a very picturesque and delightful effect;
relieving the bareness of the great shafts of the evergreens, without
being close enough in its growth to hide them wholly, or to cover the
bright mossy carpet that is spread beneath all the dense parts of the
woods.
The other species is also very picturesque and at the same time very
large, the largest tree of its kind that I have ever seen anywhere. Not
even in the great maple woods of Canada have I seen trees either as
large or with so much striking, picturesque character. It is widely
distributed throughout western Washington, but is never found scattered
among the conifers in the dense woods. It keeps together mostly in
magnificent groves by itself on the damp levels along the banks of
streams or lakes where the ground is subject to overflow. In such
situations it attains a height of seventy-five to a hundred feet and a
diameter of four to eight feet. The trunk sends out large limbs toward
its neighbors, laden with long drooping mosses beneath and rows of
ferns on their upper surfaces, thus making a grand series of richly
ornamented interlacing arches, with the leaves laid thick overhead,
rendering the underwood spaces delightfully cool and open. Never have I
seen a finer forest ceiling or a more picturesque one, while the floor,
covered with tall ferns and rubus and thrown into hillocks by the
bulging roots, matches it well. The largest of these maple groves that
I have yet found is on the right bank of the Snoqualmie River, about a
mile above the falls. The whole country hereabouts is picturesque, and
interesting in many ways, and well worthy a visit by tourists passing
through the Sound region, since it is now accessible by rail from
Seattle.
Looking now at the forests in a comprehensive way, we find in passing
through them again and again from the shores of the Sound to their
upper limits, that some portions are much older than others, the trees
much larger, and the ground beneath them strewn with immense trunks in
every stage of decay, representing several generations of growth,
everything about them giving the impression that these are indeed the
“forests primeval,” while in the younger portions, where the elevation
of the ground is the same as to the sea level and the species of trees
are the same as well as the quality of the soil, apart from the
moisture which it holds, the trees seem to be and are mostly of the
same age, perhaps from one hundred to two or three hundred years, with
no gray-bearded, venerable patriarchs—forming tall, majestic woods
without any grandfathers.
When we examine the ground we find that it is as free from those mounds
of brown crumbling wood and mossy ancient fragments as are the growing
trees from very old ones. Then perchance, we come upon a section
farther up the slopes towards the mountains that has no trees more than
fifty years old, or even fifteen or twenty years old. These last show
plainly enough that they have been devastated by fire, as the black,
melancholy monuments rising here and there above the young growth bear
witness. Then, with this fiery, suggestive testimony, on examining
those sections whose trees are a hundred years old or two hundred, we
find the same fire records, though heavily veiled with mosses and
lichens, showing that a century or two ago the forests that stood there
had been swept away in some tremendous fire at a time when rare
conditions of drouth made their burning possible. Then, the bare ground
sprinkled with the winged seed from the edges of the burned district, a
new forest sprang up, nearly every tree starting at the same time or
within a few years, thus producing the uniformity of size we find in
such places; while, on the other hand, in those sections of ancient
aspect containing very old trees both standing and fallen, we find no
traces of fire, nor from the extreme dampness of the ground can we see
any possibility of fire ever running there.
Fire, then, is the great governing agent in forest distribution and to
a great extent also in the conditions of forest growth. Where fertile
lands are very wet one half the year and very dry the other, there can
be no forests at all. Where the ground is damp, with drouth occurring
only at intervals of centuries, fine forests may be found, other
conditions being favorable. But it is only where fires never run that
truly ancient forests of pitchy coniferous trees may exist. When the
Washington forests are seen from the deck of a ship out in the middle
of the sound, or even from the top of some high, commanding mountain,
the woods seem everywhere perfectly solid. And so in fact they are in
general found to be. The largest openings are those of the lakes and
prairies, the smaller of beaver meadows, bogs, and the rivers; none of
them large enough to make a distinct mark in comprehensive views.
Of the lakes there are said to be some thirty in King’s County alone;
the largest, Lake Washington, being twenty-six miles long and four
miles wide. Another, which enjoys the duckish name of Lake Squak, is
about ten miles long. Both are pure and beautiful, lying imbedded in
the green wilderness. The rivers are numerous and are but little
affected by the weather, flowing with deep, steady currents the year
round. They are short, however, none of them drawing their sources from
beyond the Cascade Range. Some are navigable for small steamers on
their lower courses, but the openings they make in the woods are very
narrow, the tall trees on their banks leaning over in some places,
making fine shady tunnels.
The largest of the prairies that I have seen lies to the south of
Tacoma on the line of the Portland and Tacoma Railroad. The ground is
dry and gravelly, a deposit of water-washed cobbles and pebbles derived
from moraines—conditions which readily explain the absence of trees
here and on other prairies adjacent to Yelm. Berries grow in lavish
abundance, enough for man and beast with thousands of tons to spare.
The woods are full of them, especially about the borders of the waters
and meadows where the sunshine may enter. Nowhere in the north does
Nature set a more bountiful table. There are huckleberries of many
species, red, blue, and black, some of them growing close to the
ground, others on bushes eight to ten feet high; also salal berries,
growing on a low, weak-stemmed bush, a species of gaultheria, seldom
more than a foot or two high. This has pale pea-green glossy leaves two
or three inches long and half an inch wide and beautiful pink flowers,
urn-shaped, that make a fine, rich show. The berries are black when
ripe, are extremely abundant, and, with the huckleberries, form an
important part of the food of the Indians, who beat them into paste,
dry them, and store them away for winter use, to be eaten with their
oily fish. The salmon-berry also is very plentiful, growing in dense
prickly tangles. The flowers are as large as wild roses and of the same
color, and the berries measure nearly an inch in diameter. Besides
these there are gooseberries, currants, raspberries, blackberries, and,
in some favored spots, strawberries. The mass of the underbrush of the
woods is made up in great part of these berry-bearing bushes. Together
with white-flowered spiraea twenty feet high, hazel, dogwood, wild
rose, honeysuckle, symphoricarpus, etc. But in the depths of the woods,
where little sunshine can reach the ground, there is but little
underbrush of any kind, only a very light growth of huckleberry and
rubus and young maples in most places. The difficulties encountered by
the explorer in penetrating the wilderness are presented mostly by the
streams and bogs, with their tangled margins, and the fallen timber and
thick carpet of moss covering all the ground.
Notwithstanding the tremendous energy displayed in lumbering and the
grand scale on which it is being carried on, and the number of settlers
pushing into every opening in search of farmlands, the woods of
Washington are still almost entirely virgin and wild, without trace of
human touch, savage or civilized. Indians, no doubt, have ascended most
of the rivers on their way to the mountains to hunt the wild sheep and
goat to obtain wool for their clothing, but with food in abundance on
the coast they had little to tempt them into the wilderness, and the
monuments they have left in it are scarcely more conspicuous than those
of squirrels and bears; far less so than those of the beavers, which in
damming the streams have made clearings and meadows which will continue
to mark the landscape for centuries. Nor is there much in these woods
to tempt the farmer or cattle raiser. A few settlers established homes
on the prairies or open borders of the woods and in the valleys of the
Chehalis and Cowlitz before the gold days of California. Most of the
early immigrants from the Eastern States, however, settled in the
fertile and open Willamette Valley or Oregon. Even now, when the search
for land is so keen, with the exception of the bottom lands around the
Sound and on the lower reaches of the rivers, there are comparatively
few spots of cultivation in western Washington. On every meadow or
opening of any kind some one will be found keeping cattle, planting hop
vines, or raising hay, vegetables, and patches of grain. All the large
spaces available, even back near the summits of the Cascade Mountains,
were occupied long ago. The newcomers, building their cabins where the
beavers once built theirs, keep a few cows and industriously seek to
enlarge their small meadow patches by chopping, girdling, and burning
the edge of the encircling forest, gnawing like beavers, and scratching
for a living among the blackened stumps and logs, regarding the trees
as their greatest enemies—a sort of larger pernicious weed immensely
difficult to get rid of.
But all these are as yet mere spots, making no visible scar in the
distance and leaving the grand stretches of the forest as wild as they
were before the discovery of the continent. For many years the axe has
been busy around the shores of the Sound and ships have been falling in
perpetual storm like flakes of snow. The best of the timber has been
cut for a distance of eight or ten miles from the water and to a much
greater distance along the streams deep enough to float the logs.
Railroads, too, have been built to fetch in the logs from the best
bodies of timber otherwise inaccessible except at great cost. None of
the ground, however, has been completely denuded. Most of the young
trees have been left, together with the hemlocks and other trees
undesirable in kind or in some way defective, so that the neighboring
trees appear to have closed over the gaps make by the removal of the
larger and better ones, maintaining the general continuity of the
forest and leaving no sign on the sylvan sea, at least as seen from a
distance.
In felling the trees they cut them off usually at a height of six to
twelve feet above the ground, so as to avoid cutting through the
swollen base, where the diameter is so much greater. In order to reach
this height the chopper cuts a notch about two inches wide and three or
four deep and drives a board into it, on which he stands while at work.
In case the first notch, cut as high as he can reach, is not high
enough, he stands on the board that has been driven into the first
notch and cuts another. Thus the axeman may often be seen at work
standing eight or ten feet above the ground. If the tree is so large
that with his long-handled axe the chopper is unable to reach to the
farther side of it, then a second chopper is set to work, each cutting
halfway across. And when the tree is about to fall, warned by the faint
crackling of the strained fibers, they jump to the ground, and stand
back out of danger from flying limbs, while the noble giant that had
stood erect in glorious strength and beauty century after century, bows
low at last and with gasp and groan and booming throb falls to earth.
Then with long saws the trees are cut into logs of the required length,
peeled, loaded upon wagons capable of carrying a weight of eight or ten
tons, hauled by a long string of oxen to the nearest available stream
or railroad, and floated or carried to the Sound. There the logs are
gathered into booms and towed by steamers to the mills, where workmen
with steel spikes in their boots leap lightly with easy poise from one
to another and by means of long pike poles push them apart and,
selecting such as are at the time required, push them to the foot of a
chute and drive dogs into the ends, when they are speedily hauled in by
the mill machinery alongside the saw carriage and placed and fixed in
position. Then with sounds of greedy hissing and growling they are
rushed back and forth like enormous shuttles, and in an incredibly
short time they are lumber and are aboard the ships lying at the mill
wharves.
Many of the long, slender boles so abundant in these woods are saved
for spars, and so excellent is their quality that they are in demand in
almost every shipyard of the world. Thus these trees, felled and
stripped of their leaves and branches, are raised again, transplanted
and set firmly erect, given roots of iron and a new foliage of flapping
canvas, and sent to sea. On they speed in glad, free motion, cheerily
waving over the blue, heaving water, responsive to the same winds that
rocked them when they stood at home in the woods. After standing in one
place all their lives they now, like sight-seeing tourists, go round
the world, meeting many a relative from the old home forest, some like
themselves, wandering free, clad in broad canvas foliage, others
planted head downward in mud, holding wharf platforms aloft to receive
the wares of all nations.
The mills of Puget sound and those of the redwood region of California
are said to be the largest and most effective lumber-makers in the
world. Tacoma alone claims to have eleven sawmills, and Seattle about
as many; while at many other points on the Sound, where the conditions
are particularly favorable, there are immense lumbering establishments,
as at Ports Blakely, Madison, Discovery, Gamble, Ludlow, etc., with a
capacity all together of over three million feet a day. Nevertheless,
the observer coming up the Sound sees not nor hears anything of this
fierce storm of steel that is devouring the forests, save perhaps the
shriek of some whistle or the columns of smoke that mark the position
of the mills. All else seems as serene and unscathed as the silent
watching mountains.