thing. The city of Victoria, B.C., is directly opposite, twenty miles distant.
The coast lying east of Port Townsend, as far as the Elwha River, has long been settled, donation claims being taken under the Oregon Land Law on these remote shores in 1852 and 1853; New Dungeness, Squim Bay, and Protection Island in front of Port Discovery having been among the earliest settlements in the northern part of Washington, the pioneers still clinging fondly to their first choice.
Whidbey Island also, so much admired by both Vancouver and Wilkes, was quickly appropriated by the immigrants from the Western States, whose descendants inherit the lands won by indescribable hardships and danger. The first permanent settlers were the Ebey family, in 1854. I. N. Ebey was a man of unusual ability and cultivation for his time and environments. He was the second collector of customs on Puget Sound, for which distinction he paid with his life, being murdered in his own house by the Northern Indians, or Hydahs, who landed on the island in the night, and, to avenge some loss of their tribe, cut off Ebey's head and carried it away. The family escaped in the darkness, and with them a Mr. and Mrs. Corliss, who afterwards went to Southern California to live, on a sheep rancho, where they were murdered in their house by unknown persons, supposed to be Mexicans. Mrs. Corliss was a daughter of Peter Judson, the first settler at Tacoma, whose family escaped the Indian massacres of 1855-56. Yet her fate pursued her to her death in a far-off home where no danger was apprehended.
Whidbey Island contains about one hundred and fifty square miles, about six thousand acres of which is excellent prairieland, requiring no clearing, an agreeable climate, a favorable position in the Sound, and many charms of scenery, from which characteristics it obtained the title of Garden of Puget Sound. Coupeville, on Penn's Cove, is the only town of any importance, but an effort is being made to build up a place named Whidbey City, and another which has beatified the bold navigator Juan de Fuca, and called itself the city of San de Fuca. This ambitious townlet, under the patronage of its before-unheard-of saint, promises to expend two million dollars in cutting a ship-canal across the mile and a half of land between Penn's Cove
