Sea, in October, 1852. He located a tract immediately south of the present town-site of Sehome. His associates, Morrison and Thomas, took each a claim, and a company was formed called the Puget Sound Coal-Mining Association, which worked the Bellingham Bay mines from 1860 to 1879, with an average annual yield of thirteen thousand tons. A coal discovery was also reported near Clallam Bay, on the Strait of Fuca, in 1867, which was never worked.
About this same period a vein of coal was partially opened on Black River, ten miles southeast of Seattle, by Hr. R. H. Bigelow, who sold it to a company, which failed to make it remunerative, on account of its remoteness from navigable waters, and other causes. Coal had also been found in Squak Valley, fourteen miles east of Seattle, and a few tons taken out an,d sold. All these discoveries and efforts failed, partly through want of knowledge and greatly through want of capital.
At length, in 1863, a coal claim was taken up eleven miles southeast of Seattle by Philip H. Lewis, whose example was followed by several others, and a company was formed. A road was opened to Seattle, and one hundred and fifty tons of coal were sold there for ten dollars a ton, and used on steamers. This drew attention to the mine, which was finally incorporated under the name of the Lake Washington Company, with a capital stock of five hundred thousand dollars, in 1870 it sold out to a new organization, styling itself the Seattle Coal Company. There was a tramway built from the mine to Lake Washington, a scow and small steamer, for towing, being placed on the lake. With this beginning the Seattle company was able to make a success of coal-mining.
The Renton Mine, next in importance and point of time to the Seattle Mine, was first worked about 1873, and has proved profitable. A number of locations were made on Cedar and Black Rivers, about Seattle, and on the Stillaguamish, Snohomish, and Skagit Rivers, all on the east side of the Sound.
The first actual prospecting for coal in the Puyallup Valley was in 1874, when some exploiting was done on Flett Creek, a tributary of South Prairie Creek, a branch of the Puyallup, by an association of three men. About the same time a surveyor found coal on the Northern Pacific Railroad land, half a mile
