smaller inlets, some of them excellent harbours for ocean vessels, afforded the very best sites for sawmills. Early in the year 1849 the brig Orbit put into Budd's Inlet (Olympia) for a load of piles. This was the beginning of the lumber trade with San Francisco. In a short time mills were running near Olympia (Tumwater), at the mouth of the Dewamish (Seattle), at Steilacoom, Cape Flattery, New Dungeness, Port Townsend and other places. With lumber selling at sixty dollars per thousand feet, as it did for a time, the business was immensely profitable.
The discovery of coal. Aside from lumber the California communities were in great need of fuel, and the people of San Francisco made anxious inquiries about the possibility of getting coal near the harbours of the northwest coast. An inferior quality of coal had been found north of the Columbia before 1850. In 1 85 1 Samuel Hancock began searching near Puget Sound, and with the help of the natives found what seemed to be an important deposit of this useful mineral. Other discoveries were made at later times on Bellingham Bay, near Seattle, and at other points all convenient to good harbours. Some of these were soon worked, with the result that thousands of tons of coal were shipped to San Francisco annually. All of these things brought about a very prosperous condition in the little colony.
Increase in population. Since the country south of the Columbia had been settling up for a comparatively long time, the lands there had been pretty carefully
