E

VEN for the West it is a land of immensities. The Pilgrim Fathers, when they descended upon Plymouth Rock, needed nothing for the development of the small, gaunt country they saw before them but rude spade and a plow primitive as the one Triptolemus, first farmer-inventor, hewed from a log for the earth's scratching. There ax and single hand-saw sufficed for the felling of the largest trees. But this enormous country demands the power of twentieth-century machinery and methods for its peopling. And these are not enough until gigantically transformed, for even the ways of our modern and progressive East are here pygmy and useless. Yet it is a country of the American born and the American descended, of men using characteristic Yankee wit in great feats conquering Nature.

Where else would you find such an invention as the "wind-jammer scow," whose sails, when winds are adverse, can be set in the water to take advantage of the current? And here, too, old ways are

disastrous. A veritable coroner's verdict, unimpeached for truth in this land of tall stories, records the death of a new homesteader of plodding patience who undertook to clear his piece of timber land alone and by hand. After hours of work upon a half-decayed ancient of the forest, his ax had barely cut to the actual wood when a huge mass of the fissured bark, a foot thick, fell off, crushing him under tons of its soggy fiber.

You forever hear new figures of heroic labors. A mill that cuts less than a quarter of a million feet of timber a day is certainly ready for the scrap-heap. And a single haul of salmon that does not count twenty thousand fish will find no mention in the columns of the Puyallup Tribune. It is a place where even braggarts "make good," and a dull man of no imagination, could you find one, would still be doing big and ambitious things, because that is a natural part of the daily way. Here all life is magnified to a new Brobdingnag.

The character itself of this vast country

has determined the quality of the men who have settled it-men well fitted to deal with Nature in the large. East of the Cascades were the boundless deserts that great schemes of irrigation were to turn into miraculous gardens and orchards, yielding fruit that for quantity and prodigious size was still unknown in the world. West of the Cascades, and sloping to the waters of Puget Sound and of the Pacific, were the titanic forests and the fish-swarming rivers.

The eloquent promoter will tell you that the State of Washington has five great natural resources, any one of which would give it first rank in wealth. This "Evergreen State," with its millions of giant trees-fir, cedar, spruce-has more splendid forests than ever Michigan had, and so is the first of all our lumber producers, with the largest sawmills in the world. Its deposits of coal, league-long, rival the immense mines of Pennsylvania. Even Maine could never boast of such fisheries, and Tacoma to-day is shipping halibut, carloads of it, to Gloucester, Massachusetts. Washington, your demonstrator will say,

has untouched mineral wealth second only to that of Colorado. And as for agriculture, nothing on earth can compare with the prolific wonders of the Big Bend country and the Yakima Valley. It is intensive agriculture in wholesale, and inexhaustible you may call the soil, for it is sometimes eighteen feet in depth, every year further enriched by the fertilizing waters from the mountains. Here the growing of things is done in the perfection of the old farmer's dream. Irrigation gives the crops always the exact amount of water they need, and a damaging fall of temperature is unheard of. If you are the doubting Thomas of Missouri, you will have these claims well proved to you from the State book of statistics, "published under legislative authority."

It is nowhere truer than in Washington that the increase of the wealth of our country in its settlement has come more from a looting of Nature than from the productive work of men. Wealth has grown in bartering the resources of the land for money and labor. And here this astonishing development of it has all

been recent the work of much less than twenty years. Not until 1893 did "Jim" Hill's Great Northern work its way over the Rockies, and bring the first bustling thousands to the sparse settlements of Puget Sound. The rush to Alaska and its gold did not begin until 1897, and it was later still when the people of Puget Sound began to talk in a big way about Oriental trade and "the world's greatest struggle for National and commercial supremacy." The men who swarmed to the Pacific after 1893 prided themselves on being up to date," and they speedily transformed the typical Western peoples that they found dwelling about the waters of Puget Sound.

They hated the rawness

of the frontier. Long hair upon a man seemed to them as shameful as it did to the Apostle, and soon became as out of fashion as knee-breeches and cocked hats. They had small tolerance for the free-andeasy ways of the old West-the "Wild West" and that soon became extinct. Gaming houses they found in full blast along the coast; but gambling they at once made a felony; rewards were paid to informers, and, after a brief struggle,

this public evil was completely abolished. They wrought a striking change in the towns of Puget Sound, yet something of the original freedom of the West remained to stamp their independence and put a seal of distinctive character upon them. Its adventurous spirit was their own, and has quickened all their daily work.

This whole Northwestern country lives so by itself that its marks of individuality are immeasurably deepened. It is a land far away from the rest of us, and that, for one thing, points the difference. In New York we are apt to think that St. Paul. is on the borders of the extreme West. But in St. Paul they talk

as if the whole continent lay to the westward; and the nomad farmers who leave its grimy station for even the prairies of the Dakotas seem bent upon a long journey, and are vaguely called "settlers." Those who are bound for the coast of the Pacific have indeed set their faces toward a far country, and for their emigrant enterprise are dubbed "colonists."

And the land and the men as you see them to-day? This Northern Pacific slope has the climate of an England.