AN EARLY SURVEY.
On the night of the 27th of November, 1866, a party of four young men,
Ransom Bonney, Jacob Woolery, Edward Ross, and Marion Meeker, none of
whom were nineteen years old, together with a middle-aged man, the
author, whom they called "Dad", and an Indian named "Skyuck", or Jim
Meeker, camped in a small shack of a house, standing on the spot now
described as the foot of Thirty-third Street, Tacoma.
We were tired and hungry when this camp was reached at dusk of evening,
and drenched to the skin by the copious rainfall between times of gusts
of wind such as is common on November days of a Puget Sound climate.
The cabin was open, with a small fireplace with a low cat-and-clay
chimney that did not reach high enough to prevent the smoke from being
blown freely into the cabin.
"Golly, Dad, that's been a tough old day," said Ransom Bonney, who was
the wag of the party and always cheerful (his father, a pioneer of
1853, still lives at the advanced age of 92 years), as he drew off his
socks to wring them before preparing supper.[19] "Just please deliver
me from surveying on tide flats," he added, as the water ran in streams
from the socks in his hands. "But it's all right when one gets used to
it."
"Yes, but the d—l of it is, to get used to it," came as a quick
response from the lips of Jacob Woolery, who had shed most of his
clothing preparatory to drying. At the same time he was doing justice
to the boiled potatoes and ash cake, baked before the open fire in the
frying-pan. Edward Ross, the third lad of the party, said nothing. He
had been the flagman that day and frequently over boot-top deep in mud
and water without any murmur, but it was plain to me that he did not
want any more of such work.
Jacob, Edward and the Indian have long since passed away; Marion and
Ransom, the surviving members of the lads, are yet alive. At present,
only three of the whole party are left to tell the story of subdividing
the land for the Government where now the great city of Tacoma is
building. The day following the experience on the tide flat we ran the
line between sections T. 20, N., R. 3 E. Willamette, meridian almost
parallel with Pacific Avenue to a point near Seventh Street.
That day also gave a sample of what a rainy, stormy day could bring
forth in the dense forest of heavy timber and underbrush charged with
the accumulated raindrops in the intervals between the gusts of wind
and rainfall that prevailed all day.
"Dad, I believe this is worse than the tide flats," said Jake, as he
almost slid down the steep bluff just north of the Tacoma Hotel while
retracing the fifth standard parallel, to search for the bearing trees
in the meander line of Commencement Bay.
And so it was, the further the work progressed, the harder the task
seemed, and that second night's camp in the cabin found us if possible
with less comfort than the first. But we stuck to the job through thick
and thin, rain or wind, till the work was finished and the township
surveyed. Positively, if at that time one could have offered me the
land represented by that survey in lieu of the ten dollars per mile in
greenbacks (then worth seventy-five cents on the dollar) I would have
taken the greenbacks instead of the land.
Now, in the near vicinity, lots with twenty-five foot front and a
hundred foot depth have sold for twenty-five thousand dollars;
sixteen-story buildings occupy the land not three blocks away and a
city of over a hundred thousand people has grown up on the land thus
surveyed, that was then a dense virgin forest of giant timber.
FOOTNOTE:
[19] Since died at the age of 97.