Port Townsend, Anacortes, Fairhaven, Sehome, and Whatcom. The Pacific Navigation Company, a Tacoma corporation, runs its steamers from Tacoma to Whatcom, stopping at Seattle, Utsalady, Anacortes, Samish, Fairhaven, and Sehome; and also on other routes coastwise, and among the islands in the San Juan Archipelago.
The Whatcom, Sehome, and Fairhaven Company has a fleet of seven boats which run on the several routes between Tacoma and Whatcom; besides which there are forty other steamboats, including tugs, which ply on the Sound in and out of Tacoma and to every place where business is.
But as I wished to see the country tributary to Tacoma, namely, the Puyallup Yalley, 1 took the train for Seattle which runs up the Yalley as far as the town of Puyallup, where the Seattle branch comes in.
I have it from Hon. Elwood Evans, who came to Washington in 1853 with Governor I. I. Stevens, and who has ever been a careful observer and student of Northwest history, that the meaning of the Indian word Puyallup is shadow or gloom. They attached it to the river from the obscurity of its waters, which ran darkling between banks overhung with the densest of forest shrubbery, and shadowed by tall trees which covered the Yalley everywhere except where there occurred those singular small prairies referred to in my remarks on the Chehalis Yalley. These prairies were early fixed upon by settlers, and still bear the names of pioneers who as early as 1855 had extended their improvements from Commencement Bay to South Prairie.
Then fell the blow which has so often fallen upon frontier communities, and the gloom which hung over the valleys on the east side of Puget Sound was not only that of the forest, but that which had made a "dark and bloody ground" of almost every State in its turn, from Massachusetts to Washington. In 1856, to satisfy the Indians, the reservation first allowed them by Governor Stevens was enlarged, and extended up the river on both sides until it embraced a dozen claims of settlers who were already driven from them by massacre or flight. Not a family dared return to the Yalley until 1859, when a few ventured again to reside upon their former claims or take new ones.
