r farming!
But how would Dr. Blalock have gotten his five thousand acres except he had come at a time when land was cheap, or gotten ninety thousand bushels of grain to the seaboard, if he had raised all that, before the day of Dr. Baker's railroad? It is just an instance of the man and the hour coming together. Perhaps it was Dr. Blalock's action which caused Dr. Baker and other citizens to attempt a railroad.
The -most serious drawback—and every countr}' must have a drawback—to the perfect desirability of the Walla Walla Yalley for a residence is the lack of timber. The nearest lumber supply is in the Blue Mountains, about twenty miles distant, but lumber is also brought by railroad from Puget Sound and Portland. Fuel is supplied from the Blue Mountains in a novel manner,—namely, by a Y-shaped flume, which carries the wood from the mountains to within seven miles of town, where it is loaded on flat cars and taken to its destination, the "Blue Mountain Flume Company" formerly owning a narrow-gauge railway from the terminus of the flume to Walla Walla, which is now owned by the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company.
The wood consumed in the city and at Fort Walla Walla amounts to twenty-two thousand cords, only a little more than half of which comes from the Blue Mountains. It sells for six dollars to six dollars and fifty cents a cord. When the coalmines of the Cascades are sufficiently developed, coal will undoubtedly come into general use in the treeless regions; but for the present all the slab and refuse timber of the mills in the Cascades is carried by rail down into the valleys to be used as firewood.
Walla Walla City is not one of the new towns of Washington, and never had any real-estate excitement. The long occupation of the country by the Hudson Bay Company, some of whose servants remained here with their Indian relatives after white people of American blood were driven out, furnished a basis of settlement dating back to the second decade of the century. But it was not until 1858 that some American citizens established themselves on the site of the present city, under the protection of the United States fort, erected the previous year.
In 1859 it was decided among the settlers to lay out a town
