a foot or
two high. This has pale pea-green glossy leaves two or three inches long
and half an inch wide and beautiful pink flowers, urn-shaped, that
make a fine, rich show. The berries are black when ripe, are extremely
abundant, and, with the huckleberries, form an important part of the
food of the Indians, who beat them into paste, dry them, and store them
away for winter use, to be eaten with their oily fish. The salmon-berry
also is very plentiful, growing in dense prickly tangles. The flowers
are as large as wild roses and of the same color, and the berries
measure nearly an inch in diameter. Besides these there are
gooseberries, currants, raspberries, blackberries, and, in some favored
spots, strawberries. The mass of the underbrush of the woods is made
up in great part of these berry-bearing bushes. Together with
white-flowered spiraea twenty feet high, hazel, dogwood, wild rose,
honeysuckle, symphoricarpus, etc. But in the depths of the woods, where
little sunshine can reach the ground, there is but little underbrush of
any kind, only a very light growth of huckleberry and rubus and young
maples in most places. The difficulties encountered by the explorer in
penetrating the wilderness are presented mostly by the streams and bogs,
with their tangled margins, and the fallen timber and thick carpet of
moss covering all the ground.

Notwithstanding the tremendous energy displayed in lumbering and the
grand scale on which it is being carried on, and the number of settlers
pushing into every opening in search of farmlands, the woods of
Washington are still almost entirely virgin and wild, without trace of
human touch, savage or civilized. Indians, no doubt, have ascended most
of the rivers on their way to the mountains to hunt the wild sheep and
goat to obtain wool for their clothing, but with food in abundance on
the coast they had little to tempt them into the wilderness, and the
monuments they have left in it are scarcely more conspicuous than those
of squirrels and bears; far less so than those of the beavers, which in
damming the streams have made clearings and meadows which will continue
to mark the landscape for centuries. Nor is there much in these woods to
tempt the farmer or cattle raiser. A few settlers established homes
on the prairies or open borders of the woods and in the valleys of the
Chehalis and Cowlitz before the gold days of California. Most of the
early immigrants from the Eastern States, howeve