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.