2
variously spelled with a k in place of the c, or with an h at the end. It is generally believed to be an Indian word. The first time it appears in literature is in Theodore Winthrop's "Canoe and Saddle," where he professes to have been told that the Indian name of Mount Rainier was Tacoma; but the word is not found in the Indian tongue, and probably, as in the case of Jonathan Carver with the word "Origan," he partly misunderstood and partly invented. It is a very good word, however, with as much right to be as other arbitrary names, and was chosen, I have been told, by Mr. Ackerson as the name of McCarver's town, and the railroad people, with very good taste, everything considered, called their town the same, and soon there will be no difference between the old and the new.
The first thing that struck me about Tacoma was its appearance of not being an accidental town. It was evidently designed. No one could stand on these sloping heights and observe the scene carefully without seeing its intention. The natural features are quickly enumerated. The elevated plateau on which the city is built, the mouth of the rich Puyallup Valley, producing enormously in coal as well.as in lumber and agricultural products, with tide lands worth millions lying just on the right of the city front, with the Narrows on the west where there could be no other town, and a country back of it suited to the eye and to homebuilding rather than to farming, while the whole great inland sea opens its water-ways about it, all plainly say, "Here was destined to be a great commercial metropolis"
These were the natural gifts to the City of Destiny. But look how men have taken advantage of them. Look at the harbor, the railways, the Sound and ocean docks, coal bunkers, wheat-elevators, mills, dry-dock, canneries, shingle-mills, brickyards, Ryan Smelter, and Great Pacific Mills along the front, and the St. Paul and Tacoma Lumber Company's milling plant and factory. Commencement Bay Improvement Company's ocean docks, warehouses, and manufacturing centre, and other large mills being erected at the east end of the bay. These things did not come there like the accretions on an oyster-shell: they were put there by design of men of brain and foresight, and the end has justified the beginning.
The Puyallup Indian Reservation comes down to Commen
