Gazette, published here. The city has two Masonic Lodges, one of Odd-Fellows, and one of Good Templars. It has telegraphic connection with Portland and San Francisco, and only needs a railroad to make it a young metropolis. Walla Walla, by the way, is the residence of Mr. Philip Ritz, whose intelligent efforts to get the Northern Pacific Railroad through this valley entitle him to the gratitude of its people.
The visitor to Walla Walla is expected to visit the site of the Waiilatpa Mission; and to one acquainted with its history this is not an uninteresting excursion. The "place of rye-grass" is the meaning of Waiilatpa, and just describes the point of bottom-land between the Walla Walla River and Mill Creek, near their junction. It could never have been a very cheerful place, being shut in by higher rolling prairie from any extended view; but was chosen according to the rules of all pioneers: water, and a piece of bottom-land. Besides, as mentioned elsewhere, the first explorers of the country did not understand it, and believed they had secured the only fertile spot when they settled on a low bit of creek-bottom.
Waiilatpa is just that—a creek-bottom—the creeks on either side of it fringed with trees; higher land shutting out the view in front; isolation and solitude the most striking features of the place. Yet here came a man and a woman to live and to labor among savages, when all the old Oregon Territory was an Indian country. Here stood the station erected by them: adobe houses, a mill, a school-house for the Indians, shops, and all the necessary appurtenances of an isolated settlement. Nothing remains to-day but mounds of earth, into which the adobes were dissolved by weather, after burning. Among the ruins are fragments of burnt
