Columbia. This mountain is said to be filled with coal on one side and with iron on the other. It is covered with heavy timber, which is being removed to facilitate the opening of the mines, and a town site is being cleared, which will be required when the mines are opened.
The river flows with a twelve-miles-an-hour current at this distance from the Sound; thirty-five miles inland the passage grows narrower and the scenery more striking. Birdview is a pretty spot, where a water-fall twenty-five feet in width comes plunging down from a height, and runs the machinery of a saw-mill. Above this point the fall in the river increases, and it takes the steamer half an hour to pass through a rocky defile three hundred feet in width, but of no great length.
Not far beyond this pass, Baker Biver, a large stream, enters the Skagit from the south, seeming scarcely to augment its volume. Its valley is heavily timbered, and, if rumor is correct, the hills which border it are stored with coal, iron, and marble.
On the north bank of the Skagit, eight miles beyond the junction of Baker Biver, is Sauk City, at the mouth of Sauk Biver, a stream which comes down from Mount Baker through a very rugged country. Sauk Mountain, close to the river, is six thousand feet in height. Beyond this point navigation becomes difficult, even in high water, and at Cascade we turn about to descend.
The Seattle and Northern Bailroad, which is chartered to build from Anacortes to Spokane, with a branch to Seattle, and which has already completed a connection with the Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern, is surveying its line east of the head of navigation, making for the Skagit Pass. Until transportation is afforded by railway, little development will take place in the mining region beyond.
It is curious to note, that, whereas we set out with the impression that our route lay through il twilight woods" almost perpetually, we found quite a number of good farms and comfortable farm-houses in the Skagit Valley as far as we proceeded, so rapidly does achievement follow upon attempt in this rich and favored region. I will be quite honest, and say, what I think to be the truth, that the very newness of the country helps the beginner here, by the absence of close competition.
