V
Seattle, Washington, August 19: After spending a few hours in Livingston, which has a sightly location, at the mouth of a canyon and in sight of a mountain on which the snow lies for ten months in the year, we proceeded westward. From Montana we passed into Idaho, where the tree butchers are cutting up the last remnants of the white pine. It is, for the most part, a dreary country, where the timber has been cut over and where forest fires have left masses of charred stumpage. Waste everywhere and nothing but waste! The American lumberman in the past has picked out the best and left the rest to the desolation that follows the man with the axe and the torch. It has been the working out of the practical American idea of getting the most money with the least care about the future. It is pity and disgust and indignation that one feels. But such are the ravages ofcommerce in a commercial era among a commercial people.
The next day we reached Spokane, on the other side of the Rockies, mistress of a vast industrial area, reaching up into the mountains on one side, with their mines and their lumber, and stretching out over the Washington wheat fields, on the other. A great city, the creation of a few years, but to the casual traveler, more or less uninteresting, broiling and sizzling in the August sun, treeless, for the most part, and to that extent cheerless. But the volume of business transacted is large and the business buildings are fine and the people, grown richer, are building new houses and surrounding themselves with the luxuries which American people everywhere seek after and prize.
Leaving Spokane, going westward, one enters the great wheat country, a plateau lying between the Rocky Mountains and the coast ranges. Where the railroads run, the country is more or less rough, with here and there formations that suggest “bad lands,” but much of the country is level and productive. It is a vast treeless region; rainless in summer. The mercury rises as high as 100 in the night time.When the wind blows, which it is apt to do, dust fills the air. Much of the soil seems to be as fine as flour and very light when it is very dry. We rode for hours without seeing a drop of water, in creek or lake. What a precious thing water must be to the people—in summer time, when they need it most! There are no homes in these wheat fields. Here and there are scattered hovels which the sowers and the reapers use in their seasons, but no permanent abodes. Wire fences are stretched across the fields, far apart. How different it all is from the farming countries of the Mississippi Valley, with their well fenced farms, the homes of the farmers in the midst of groves and orchards and the grazing herds of cattle and flocks of sheep. Here and there one saw a horseman riding in a pillar of dust. The trails of dust one sees are the only evidences of highways, or of travel. It is a great wheat producing country, when it has been revived by the rains of winter, but the men who grow that wheat ought to be well paid for their labors. It was night when we reached the Columbia River, the mighty stream that wends across these wheat fields, deep down in its channel, so deep that the use of itswaters for purposes of irrigation seems almost hopeless. The winds that blow across the plateau may solve the question.
Seattle is a marvel in the way of city building. It is growing in every direction and in every way. Located on a great inland sea, in sight of the mountains and blest with a climate of wonderful evenness, at the end of the great transcontinental railways and where the large vessels are loaded and unloaded for the orient and the coastwise trade, the destiny of this city can hardly be overdrawn. Seattle has absorbed the major energies of the American northwest. The men who founded the city laid out its streets in almost impossible places, but modern engineering is cutting down the hills and filling up the hollows. There is no end to the enterprise of the people in these respects. Every breath one breathes in Seattle is a city breath. Men from the prairies of Iowa have become city builders in Seattle. Industrial reverses may overtake them, they likely will, and their winters are said to be atrociously foggy and wet, but they are going to make Seattle a place of which all Americans will be proud, one of the great commercial cities of the Pacific Ocean.