which Olympia is situated. There are mills and manufactories on Des Chutes River, which here falls into tide water, making a very pretty cataract. The town itself is sleepy and old-fashioned, and for that reason more interesting than those bran-new ones, all bustle and discomfort. Here was made the first American settlement, in 1845, when seven emigrants, five of whom had families, forced their way through the forest along the Cowlitz and the Chehalis Yalley to Puget Sound. The leader of this mighty host was Michael T. Simmons, a Kentuckian of the Daniel Boone order, who selected this place for settlement, and erected the first flouring-mill in all this region, a small atfair in a log-house, the millstones being hewn out of blocks of granite found on the beach. Even unbolted flour was a luxury after a year of boiled wheat. Tumwater is a good place to listen to pioneer stories and reflect what man can do.
A belt of timber about two miles in breadth encircles the Sound, even where the back country is prairie. Olympia therefore was hewn out of the forest, but it has a pretty situation, and resembles a Hew England town more than any other I have seen in the Northwest. Perhaps I should say it did resemble a New England town, for I found on the occasion of my late visit that it was partaking of the hurry and exhilaration of real-estate transfers in anticipation of* coming events—and railroads. I prefer to speak of it as it had appeared to me on former occasions, when it had an air of home comfort and cheerful leisure, produced by snug residences, good sidewalks, pleasant gardens, shade-trees, and a neighborly friendliness joined to a frank independence in its citizens, who withal were rather above the average in intelligence. And why not, when the capital had always been here, and the people were used to hearing public questions discussed ?
One of Olympia’s charms to me was its long bridges and wharves—for the tide has a great rise and fall in this inlet. To be suspended over water on a bridge, a long one, was always to me fascinating. To be at rest over the restless water,, and gaze upon its instability and dream! In Olympia one can do this, when the tide is in. When it is out one can watch the millions of squirming things left by the receding flood in the oozy mud. Standing on the long bridge, too, we can gaze upon the Olympian
