affords little land that is good for grain, for, as before noticed, these streams coming into the Sound are affected by the tides, the lowest land being overflowed daily. That portion of each valley which is free from submersion furnishes the most fertile soil imaginable for the production of every kind of grain, fruit, and vegetable, if we except melons, grapes, and peaches, which, owing to the cool nights, mature less perfectly than in East Washington. The valleys of these small rivers, like those of West Oregon, already described, are covered at first with a rank growth of moisture-loving trees, such as the ash, alder, willow, and poplar. But they are easily cleared, and the soil is of that warm, rich nature that it produces a rapid growth of everything intrusted to its bosom. Owing to the fact that these valleys are narrow, and head in mountains at no great distance, they are occasionally subject to floods. As floods never occur, however, except in the rainy or winter season, a proper precaution in building, and harvesting his crops, should insure the farmer against loss from them when they do occur.
Olympia has a college, a hundred-thousand-dollar hotel, electric lights, water-works, and street-railway service. The State- House is a wooden structure which, although in good repair, is no credit to the rich young State of Washington, to whom Congress has given one hundred and thirty-two thousand acres of land for public buildings. The State constitution does not locate all the public buildings at the capital, but distributes them among the several towns and cities. Vancouver, on the Columbia, has the State School for Defective Youth ; Medical Lake, in the extreme eastern part of the State, has the Insane Asylum; Seattle, the State University; and Walla Walla, the State Penitentiary. The State Agricultural College will probably soon be located by the commissioners at some point in East Washington. I do not like this plan of distributing public institutions so well as Oregon’s plan of concentrating them at the capital, making a handsome city at the seat of government, and keeping these affairs of the government under the eye of the appropriating power.
Washington’s Territorial Penitentiary was on McNeil’s Island, in Puget Sound, about twenty miles northeast of Oh'mpia; and the Insane Asylum was at Steilacoom, on the mainland opposite,
