most striking features. As these glaciers moved down the mountains, much higher then than now, ice-floes were formed in which were imbedded blocks of slate arid boulders of granite, and as these floes floated on the waters or melted on the earth where they were stranded, they deposited these fragments over the future State of Washington, to be found and utilized in our nineteenth century. When, the glacial period was passed the waters distributed their mud, gravel, and sand, forming those deep deposits found on the shores of Puget Sound, Gray's Harbor, and Shoalwater Bay. Then followed another period during which the waters were drained off and the country assumed its present general appearance."
From this history is deduced these facts in regard to minerals in Washington: The coal-bearing belt on the west slope of the Cascades belongs to the early cretaceous period, as do also the gold-bearing slates, limestones, and marbles of East Washington. But the sandstones, bearing marine shells of a later type, found abundantly in the hills bordering the Sound, the Chehalis and the Cowlitz Rivers, and the lignite coals of West Washington, belong to the tertiary period; while the high, light-colored bluffs on the Sound and the bays before referred to belong to the quaternary.
Of the various minerals belonging to the Northwest coast already enumerated in the mineralogy of Oregon, few have been to any extent developed in Washington, these few being coal, iron, gold, silver, limestone, and sandstone.
Coal was known to exist in the Cowlitz Yalley as early as 184.8, when a small quantity was sent to San Francisco to be tested, and declared worthless. Two years later it was discovered at Skookum Chuck, one of the forks of the Chehalis River. Meanwhile it had been heard of at Bellingham Bay, and on the Stillaguamish River about the same period. An analysis of croppings was made in 1851 for the Secretary of the Navy; and the Pacific Mail Company, whose coal cost them forty dollars per ton, employed agents to explore for this mineral on both sides of the Columbia.
The first coal-claim taken up was by William Pattle, an English subject, looking for spar timber on the coast of the Fuca
