Page:History of the Oregon Country volume 2.djvu/56

CHAPTER XVI

REMINISCENCES OF PUGET SOUND

RETROSPECT OF PIONEER BEGINNINGS^[1]

Two months hence it will be forty -nine years since I first saw Olympia.^[2] There were a few houses on the border of the bay; back of them the unbroken forest. This was an Indian country. By fully ten to one the number of Indians here and northward exceeded the whites. Indian canoes,^[3] to the number of thousands, cut these waters. Many hundreds of them I have seen drawn up here at Olympia at once; and many times great canoes from the north, each one carrying from forty to seventy natives, gay in their highly colored and parti-colored toggery, came up to Olympia, then the chief town, for trade or display. The white population of the town might have been 250. Roundabout the town were small agricultural settlements. Steilacoom^[4] was Olympia's^[5] rival, and, in my boyhood, I was accustomed to hear the champions of each hold forth in wordy and sometimes angry contention on the claims of each to present and coming greatness. In the scale of commercial importance Seattle^[6] was far below Olympia and Steilacoom , and Tacoma as yet was not even a name. There was a very small village at

1. An address by Mr. Scott, March 3, 1903, at semicentennial celebration of Washington , a territory, on invitation of a joint committee of the Washington legislature and of the Olympia chamber of commerce, at Olympia. For details of the pioneer migration to Puget Sound, see vol. II, pp. 244-45.
2. This date was May 6, 1854.
3. See Compiler's Appendix, vol. II, p. 245.
4. Fort Steilacoom was built in 1849 as a military post of the United States Government. The name is that of an Indian chief of the Nisqually tribe. The town was incorporated March 27, 1854, and is the oldest in Washington. See Compiler's Appendix, vol. 11, pp. 245-46.
5. Olympia was named from Mount Olympus. See vol. I, p. 285; vol. ii, p. 248.
6. The site of Seattle was first settled in 1850–51. The town was laid out in 1853 by Arthur A. Denny, Carson D. Boren and David S. Maynard. See The Oregonian, November 14, 1893, p. 4 ; November 17, 1889, p. 8. See also Compiler's Appendix, vol. II, p. 246.

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