Page:All Over Oregon and Washington.djvu/113

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WALLA WALLA VALLEY.
107

its aspect of cheerfulness and thrift, with its neat residences and embowering trees, and the general air of comfort and stability which it presents. The population of Walla Walla city is in the neighborhood of fifteen hundred. Its trade is derived from a well-to-do farming community, and from outfitting for the mines of Idaho and Montana. Judging from the thronged appearance of the streets, the merchants are doing a profitable business.

Walla Walla enjoys the luxury of plenty of pure, bright, sparkling water. Mill Creek, one of the several semicircular streams before spoken of, passes through the town, and is diverted into a hundred tiny rivulets which course through its length and breadth, laughing, and glinting in and out every body's garden, carrying coolness, fertility, and music to each well-kept homestead. The flowers, vegetables, and fruits of Walla Walla gardens attest the use and the worth of these tiny canals.

In educational and religious institutions Walla Walla is very well represented. The Whitman Seminary was chartered in the winter of 1859–60, and built in 1867 by subscriptions from the people, to commemorate the services and sufferings of the Missionary martyr, Dr. Marcus Whitman, who, with his wife, and others, was murdered by the Cayuse Indians, in November, 1847. Out of this germ will probably grow the future University of the Walla Walla Valley. Aside from this institution, there are two high-schools in Walla Walla—one Protestant, and one Catholic; and a Teachers' Institute, organized in the summer of 1870, besides a number of public schools. Of churches there are several, well attended, and with flourishing memberships. There are two weekly newspapers, and a Real Estate