roads from the Sound will produce, and whether Gray's Harbor will not set up jobbing-houses of its own. In 1889 there was but one steamer a month from San Francisco; in 1890 there was one every twelve days. When the railroads are opened to travel, that will of course be too slow, with such marvellous quickness do affairs move in this wondrous wilderness.
CHAPTER XXI.
OLYMPIC GOSSIP.
There is a club-shaped piece of territory north of the Chehalis River and Gray's Harbor, fifty miles broad at its base and probably eighty at its northern end, which has the Pacific Ocean on the west, the Fuca Strait on the north, and Hood's Canal on the east, and is known as the Olympic Peninsula. It consists of a mass of mountains, highest and most broken on the north and east, the range following the strait and Hood's Canal, and sloping off in a chaos of lesser mountains towards the west and south.
It was a happy thought of the Englishman Meares, on July 4, 1788, to name the highest peak of the main range Mount Olympus, for sacred to the gods it has remained from the creation until the present year, 1890. All that was known of it during forty-five years of settlement on Puget Sound was confined to a few miles of border land on the three sides bounded by water. No government surveys were made except at a few points along the strait and a single one on the sea-coast, where a light-house was erected to warn off, not to attract, the curious. Two Indian reservations were located on the sea-side, but nobody on them knew anything about the interior,—not even the Indians. No "darkest Africa" could be more unknown. Imagination peopled it with giants or pigmies, according to the taste of the dreamer. Through it roamed the fiercest wild beasts, and in the solemn gloom of its forest-hidden caves was concealed treasure incalculable.
