mense forests of fir, cedar, spruce, and hemlock, its numerous small but rich valleys, and its minerals, including coal, gold, iron, tin, valuable stone, and a variety of clays. The streams were swarming with speckled trout, and the forests with game. These rumors still further stimulated public curiosity and interest. I met at Gray's Harbor the first ladies to undertake a journey into the Olympics,—Mrs. John Soule and Mrs. John G. McMillan,—who, with their husbands, went up the coast by a trail as far as the government warehouse at Owyhut, and thence to the Quinault Reservation along the beach, crossing the rivers at their mouths, where they were most shallow. On the Chepalis one settler was found who had lived there for nine years. At the reservation they were entertained by the family of the agent, Captain Willoughby, who, with Mrs. Willoughby, related to them many Indian legends. But in these legends I see little to admire; they are exceedingly puerile and pointless, and not worth preserving.
From the reservation the party ascended the Quinault River by canoe having Indian boatmen. The time occupied in getting to the lake of that name, a distance of forty miles, was three days, many portages around "jams" having to be made. At their first camp, made at an Indian rancherie, there was set up before the house of the chief a figure-head of a wrecked vessel as a totem. At the lake they found strawberries—time, last of May, 1888—on the banks, and delicious trout in the waters. The valley of the lake was described to me as romantically beautiful. They found the lake to be of an oval shape, lying northeast by southwest, and about five by two and a half miles in extent, with a depth of from seventy to two hundred and twenty feet. The theory of its formation held by this party was that an avalanche had dammed the waters of the Quinault, which finally found their outlet by a depression to the southwest, through which they cut a channel toward the sea. The mountains on the sea-side are steep, and a ridge runs along the north, but the valley lies on the east side. If the theory of an avalanche were true, the story of the Indians' happy valley of long ago might have a shadow of foundation.
Having heard on the reservation that by going up the river beyond the lake, which could be done by the help of Indians, a
