with the surrounding country. Its population is about four hundred.
Three or four miles below Cosmopolis, and on the north side of the river, is Aberdeen. It is situated at the mouth of the Wishkah, a tributary of the Chehalis, and just inside the mouth of the latter river, where it broadens out into an inlet of Gray’s Harbor. This point was settled, I am told, by Samuel Benn, in 1866, but no town was founded until 1884. As the little steamer swung alongside the wharf, I was reminded of Astoria, so much of the town is built upon wharves extending over tide-land. The whole of the business part of the town is planked, and most of the residences are on the higher ground. Four large saw-mills are located here, a salmon-cannery, a foundry and machine shop, a brickyard, and a shipyard. It has an electric- light plant, good hotels, schools, churches, banks, a population of between two and three thousand, and two newspapers, the Herald and Bulletin. Early in 1890 a company purchased land on the south side of the river, laying it out in town lots, and calling it South Aberdeen. The first sale of any consequence was made just before I saw it, to a Michigan company, who bought seven hundred feet of the water-front for the purpose of erecting a shingle-mill and box-factory of large capacity.
I was now in sight of my destination,—Hoquiam, on Gray’s Harbor,—to which we steamed on after disembarking a large number of passengers at Aberdeen. A few minutes brought us alongside a wharf at the head of the north channel, and to the little maritime city with an Indian name, which faces the south, and lies at the mouth of the Hoquiam Biver. Like Aberdeen, it requires much planking, being laid out on land which Vancouver, in 1792, described as “low and apparently swampy, the soil thin over a bed of stones and pebbles,” and the country at a small distance covered with wood, “principally pine of an inferior growth.” A hundred years may have elevated the land somewhat, and have increased the size of the trees, for there is only the marsh grass and rushes of any tide-flat to liken it to a swamp, and the trees are not at present of an inferior growth. The beach, like most of these northern waters, is rough and shingly; the flats and shallows being unsightly with the drift brought down by the rivers. And the mention of this feature
