r, settled in the
fertile and open Willamette Valley or Oregon. Even now, when the search
for land is so keen, with the exception of the bottom lands around the
Sound and on the lower reaches of the rivers, there are comparatively
few spots of cultivation in western Washington. On every meadow or
opening of any kind some one will be found keeping cattle, planting hop
vines, or raising hay, vegetables, and patches of grain. All the large
spaces available, even back near the summits of the Cascade Mountains,
were occupied long ago. The newcomers, building their cabins where the
beavers once built theirs, keep a few cows and industriously seek to
enlarge their small meadow patches by chopping, girdling, and burning
the edge of the encircling forest, gnawing like beavers, and scratching
for a living among the blackened stumps and logs, regarding the trees
as their greatest enemies--a sort of larger pernicious weed immensely
difficult to get rid of.

But all these are as yet mere spots, making no visible scar in the
distance and leaving the grand stretches of the forest as wild as they
were before the discovery of the continent. For many years the axe has
been busy around the shores of the Sound and ships have been falling in
perpetual storm like flakes of snow. The best of the timber has been
cut for a distance of eight or ten miles from the water and to a much
greater distance along the streams deep enough to float the logs.
Railroads, too, have been built to fetch in the logs from the best
bodies of timber otherwise inaccessible except at great cost. None of
the ground, however, has been completely denuded. Most of the young
trees have been left, together with the hemlocks and other trees
undesirable in kind or in some way defective, so that the neighboring
trees appear to have closed over the gaps make by the removal of the
larger and better ones, maintaining the general continuity of the forest
and leaving no sign on the sylvan sea, at least as seen from a distance.

In felling the trees they cut them off usually at a height of six to
twelve feet above the ground, so as to avoid cutting through the swollen
base, where the diameter is so much greater. In order to reach this
height the chopper cuts a notch about two inches wide and three or four
deep and drives a board into it, on which he stands while at work. In
case the first notch, cut as high as he can reach, is not high enough,
he stands on the board that has been