siness blocks, schools, churches, factories, and
foundries. The lusty, titanic clang of boiler making may be heard there,
and plenty of the languid music of pianos mingling with the babel
noises of commerce carried on in a hundred tongues. The main streets are
crowded with bright, wide-awake lawyers, ministers, merchants, agents
for everything under the sun; ox drivers and loggers in stiff, gummy
overalls; back-slanting dudes, well-tailored and shiny; and fashions and
bonnets of every feather and color bloom gayly in the noisy throng and
advertise London and Paris. Vigorous life and strife are to be seen
everywhere. The spirit of progress is in the air. Still it is hard to
realize how much good work is being done here of a kind that makes
for civilization--the enthusiastic, exulting energy displayed in the
building of new towns, railroads, and mills, in the opening of mines of
coal and iron and the development of natural resources in general. To
many, especially in the Atlantic States, Washington is hardly known
at all. It is regarded as being yet a far wild west--a dim, nebulous
expanse of woods--by those who do not know that railroads and steamers
have brought the country out of the wilderness and abolished the old
distances. It is now near to all the world and is in possession of a
share of the best of all that civilization has to offer, while on some
of the lines of advancement it is at the front.

Notwithstanding the sharp rivalry between different sections and
towns, the leading men mostly pull together for the general good and
glory,--building, buying, borrowing, to push the country to its place;
keeping arithmetic busy in counting population present and to come,
ships, towns, factories, tons of coal and iron, feet of lumber, miles
of railroad,--Americans, Scandinavians, Irish, Scotch, and Germans being
joined together in the white heat of work like religious crowds in time
of revival who have forgotten sectarianism. It is a fine thing to see
people in hot earnest about anything; therefore, however extravagant and
high the brag ascending from Puget Sound, in most cases it is likely to
appear pardonable and more.

Seattle was named after an old Indian chief who lived in this part of
the Sound. He was very proud of the honor and lived long enough to
lead his grandchildren about the streets. The greater part of the lower
business portion of the town, including a long stretch of wharves and
warehouses built on piles