Mount Vernon, on the swift and beautiful Skagit river, was taken up as a land claim in 1871 by Jaspar Gates, the first house on the river having been erected in 1861 by Owin Kincaid. There is a cranberry marsh here, owned by a California company. From 80 acres of vines, 5,900 bushels of cranberries were gathered in 1889. Port Townsend, Whatcom, and Sehome, long apparently lifeless, have blossomed out with elegant homes, stately hotels, and banking-houses. Fairhaven, also on Bellingham bay, has a charming situation, and is rapidly growing.

Centralia, Aberdeen, and all the towns in the fertile Chehalis valley are sharing the results of agricultural and milling enterprises. The following is the history of Aberdeen, by Samuel Benn, its founder, born in New York in 1832, coming to Cal. in 1856; worked in Tuolumne mines until 1859, when he came to Puget Sound, and purchasing a boat explored Black river, and took up a pre-emption claim. In 1868 he removed to Chehalis valley, where he purchased 592 acres of land, raising cattle and dairying until 1884, when he laid out the town of Aberdeen, devoting in all 240 acres to the town-site, giving away 49 acres in mill-sites to promote business, and also donated 50 acres to J. M. Weatherwax, in alternate blocks, for the same purpose. He is principal owner in the Washingtonian cannery; has been sheriff and county commissioner, and built the first boat to run on the Chehalis river. He married Martha A. Redmond in 1862, and has 5 daughters and 2 sons. Gray's Harbor is attracting much attention, but whether some settled or some newly selected site will be the port of the future is not yet apparent. Kelso, in Cowlitz valley, 6 miles from the Columbia, has hopes of future greatness, calling itself the gate of Cowlitz,' and claims superior advantages and eminent intelligence, either of which are no mean recommendations.

The assessed value of taxable property in Wash. has increased from $18,922,922 in 1878, to $84,641,548 in 1888, according to the report of Secretary Owings-a gain of $65,718,626 in ten years. The richest co. is King, the second Pierce, the third Spokane, the fourth Whitman, the fifth Walla Walla, then Lincoln, Clarke, Columbia, each valued at nearly $3,000,000, after which the other counties range from $2,000,000 down to $300,000. The area of the state is 69,994 sq. miles; area of tide-water inside, 1,258 sq. miles; of shore-line inside, 1,992 miles; area of Lake Washington, 41 sq. miles. Estimated population, by Owings, 432,600.

Among the more prominent citizens of Spokane Falls are the following. Herbert Bolster came in 1885 with an established reputation as a lawyer and real estate agent. He enjoys the confidence of the community, and has been intrusted with much valuable city property, together with the laying out of numerous additions. He is a director of the Washington Water Power Co., the Spokane Cable Ry. Co., and other leading corporations.

A. M. Cannon, a native of Monmouth, Ill., came to this coast in 1858, and to Spokane Falls in 1878, now ranks among the millionaires of that city, his wealth being acquired solely by his own industry and business judgment. To him is mainly due the building of the Spokane and Palouse railroad, Spokane Mill Co., the Bank of Spokane Falls, and other prominent enterprises. As mayor, and in other public offices, he has gained the esteem and good-will of all classes of the people.

In 1878 J. J. Browne, a native of Grenville, O., settled at Spokane Falls, soon acquired an extensive law practice, and became one of the leaders of the democratic party, his services as a school director being especially valuable. In 1889 he was chosen a delegate to the constitutional convention, serving with marked ability. He has aided largely in building up the city.

W. H. Taylor, a native of Mich., has also contributed largely to the development of his adopted city, in 1887 as mayor, as president of the Spokane Nat. Bank and of the board of trade, and in other positions.

Others worthy of note are F. R. Moore, a director of the Washington Water Power Co., of the cable line company, and of several banks, and B. F. Burch, M. D., one of the oldest residents of the city. Both these gentlemen are among the wealthiest and most respected citizens of Spokane.

HISTORY OF IDAHO.

CHAPTER I.

PHYSICAL FEATURES AND NATURAL WEALTH.

TERRITORIAL LIMITS-THE WORLD'S WONDER-LAND-RIVERS, MOUNTAINS, AND VALLEYS - PHENOMENAL FEATURES - LAVA-FIELDS MINERAL SPRINGS-CLIMATE-SCORES OF LIMPID LAKES-ORIGIN OF THE NAME 'IDAHO'-INDIFFERENCE OF EARLY IMMIGRANTS-NATURAL PRODUCTIONS -GAME-FOOD SUPPLY-FUR-BEARING ANIMALS-FIRST MORMON SETTLEMENT-COUNTY DIVISIONS OF IDAHO AS PART OF WASHINGTON.

THE territory of Idaho was set off by congress March 3, 1863. It was erected out of the eastern portion of Washington with portions of Dakotah and Nebraska, and contained 326,373 square miles, lying between the 104th and 117th meridians of longitude, and the 42d and 49th parallels of latitude. It embraced the country east of the summits of the Rocky Mountains to within fifty miles of the great bend of the Missouri below the mouth of the Yellowstone, including the Milk River, White Earth, Big Horn, Powder River, and a portion of the Platte region on the North Fork and Sweetwater. Taken all together, it is the most grand, wonderful, romantic, and mysterious part of the domain enclosed within the federal union.

Within its boundaries fell the Black Hills, Fort Laramie, Long's Peak, the South Pass, Green River, Fort Hall, Fort Boisé, with all that wearisome stretch of road along Snake River made by the annual trains

of Pacific-bound immigrants since 1843, and earlier. Beyond these well-known stations and landmarks no information had been furnished to the public concerning that vast wilderness of mountains interspersed with apparently sterile sand deserts, and remarkable, so far as understood, only for the strangeness of its rugged scenery, which no one seemed curious to explore.

The Snake River,' the principal feature known to travellers, is a sullen stream, generally impracticable, and here and there wild and swift, navigable only for short distances, above the mouth of the Clearwater, broken by rapids and falls, or coursing dark and dangerous between high walls of rock. Four times between Fort Hall and the mouth of the Bruneau, a distance of 150 miles, the steady flow of water is broken by falls. The first plunge at American Falls,' twenty-five miles from Fort Hall, is over a precipice 60 feet or more in height, after which it flows between walls of trap-rock for a distance of 70 miles, when it enters a deeper cañon several miles in length and from 800 to 1,000 feet in width, emerging from which it divides and passes around a lofty pinnacle of rock standing in the bed of the stream, the main portion of the river rushing over a ledge and falling 180 feet without a break, while the smaller stream descends by successive plunges in a series of rapids for some distance before it takes its final leap to the pool below. These are called the Twin Falls, and sometimes the Little Falls to distinguish them from the Great Shoshone Falls, four miles below, where the entire volume of water plunges down 210 feet after a preliminary descent of 30 feet by rapids. Forty miles west, at the Salmon or Fishing falls, the river makes its last great downward jump of forty feet, after which

1The name of this stream was taken from the natives inhabiting its banks, and has been variously called Snake, Shoshone, and Les Serpents. Lewis and Clarke named it after the former-Lewis River. See Native Races of the Pacific States, and Hist. Northwest Coast, passim, this series.

2 So named from the loss of a party of Americans who attempted to navi gate the river in canoes. Palmer's Jour., 44.

TOPOGRAPHY OF IDAHO.

395

it flows, with frequent rapids and cañons, onward to the Columbia, in some places bright, pure, and sparkling with imprisoned sunshine, in others noiseless, cold, and dark, eddying like a brown serpent among fringes of willows, or hiding itself in shadowy ravines untrodden by the footsteps of the all-dominating white man.

This 500 feet of descent by cataracts is made on the lower levels of the great basin, where the altitude above the sea is from 2,130 feet, at the mouth of the Owyhee, to 4,240 at the American Falls. The descent of 2,110 feet in a distance of 250 miles is sufficient explanation of the unnavigable character of the Serpent River. Other altitudes furnish the key to the characteristics of the Snake Basin. The eastern gateway to this region, the South Pass, is nearly 7,500 feet high, and the mountain peaks in the Rocky range from 10,000 to 13,570 feet, the height of Frémont Peak. The pass to the north through the Blackfoot country is 6,000 feet above the sea, which is the general level of that region, while various peaks in the Bitter Root range rise to elevations between 7,000 and 10,000 feet. Florence mines, where the discoverers were rash enough to winter, has an altitude of 8,000 feet, while Fort Boisé is 6,000 feet lower, being in the lowest part of the valley of Snake River. Yet within a day's travel on horseback are rugged mountains where the snow lies until late in the spring, topped by others where it never melts, as the miners soon ascertained by actual experience. The largest body of level land furnished with grass instead of artemesia is Big Camas prairie, on the head waters of Malade or Wood river, containing about 200 square miles, but at an altitude of 4,700 feet, which seemed to render it unfit for any agricultural purposes,

Riblett's Snake River Region, MS., 2-4; Starr's Idaho, MS., 4; Idaho Scraps, 27, 35; Boisé Statesman, July 4, 1868; Portland West Shore, July 1877. 'The mean altitude of Montana is given as 3,900 feet in Gannett's List of Elevations, 161.

although it was the summer paradise of the United States cavalry for a time, and of horse and cattle

owners.

There are valleys on the Payette, Clearwater, lower Snake, Boisé, Weiser, Blackfoot, Malade, and Bear rivers, besides several smaller ones. They range in size from twenty to a hundred miles in length, and from one to twenty miles in width, and with other patches of fertile land aggregate ten millions of acres in that part of the new territory whose altered boundaries now constitute Idaho, all of which became known to be well adapted to farming and fruit-raising, although few persons were found at first to risk the experiment of sowing and planting in a country which was esteemed as the peculiar home of the mineralogist and miner.

In a country like this men looked for unusual things, for strange phenomena, and they found them. A volcano was discovered about the head waters of the Boisé, which on many occasions sent up smoke and columns of molten lava in 1866, and in August 1881 another outburst of lava was witnessed in the mountains east of Camas prairie, while at the same time an earthquake shock was felt. In 1864 the Salmon River suddenly rose and fell several feet, rising a second time higher than before, being warm and muddy.

Notwithstanding the evidences of volcanic eruptions, and the great extent of lava overflow along Snake River, the country between Reynolds Creek in Owyhee and Bruneau River was one vast bed of organic remains, where the bones of extinct species of animals were found,' and also parts of the human skeleton of

Buffalo Hump, an isolated butte between Clearwater and Salmon rivers, is the mountain here referred to. The lava overflow was renewed in September, when 'great streams of lava' were 'running down the mountain, the molten substance burning everything in its path. The flames shoot high in the air, giving at a long distance the appearance of a grand conflagration.' A rumbling noise accompanied the overflow. Wood River Miner, Sept. 21, 1881; Idaho World, June 30, 1866; Silver City Avalanche, Jan. 29, 1881.

John Keenan of Florence witnessed this event. Boisé News, Aug. 13, 1864. Early Events, MS., 9. H. B. Maize found a tusk 9 inches in diameter at the base and 6 feet long embedded in the soil on Rabbit Creek, 10 miles from