a mile of ditching; the same drainage reclaiming twenty thousand acres of the best grass lands. A comparatively small expense would build a dock at Olympia, covering 1,800 acres, in which vessels could be kept afloat when the tide is out; and such a dock will no doubt be built before long, whether or not this city becomes—what, of course, it aspires to be—the terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad. The population of Olympia is about thirteen hundred.
Western Washington, unlike Western Oregon, has no chief river, with its numerous tributaries, draining a great valley; but it has, nevertheless, its central body of water, into which flow frequent small rivers, draining the Puget Sound Basin, which is bounded, like the Wallamet Valley, by the Cascade and Coast ranges, on the east and west, and by their intermingling spurs on the south. These rivers, unlike those of Oregon, are all affected by the ebb and flow of the tides; and have their lowest bottom-lands overflowed. The Sound itself is not one simple great inlet of the sea; but is an indescribably tortuous body of water, which is not even a sound; being too deep for soundings, in some of its narrowest parts. So eccentric are its meanderings that the whole county of Kitsap is inclosed so nearly in the embraces of its several long arms, as very narrowly to escape being an island.
That particular arm of the Sound upon which Olympia is situated is six miles in length by from one to one and a half miles in width; narrowing to a quarter of a mile when opposite the town. At low-tide the water recedes entirely at this point, leaving a mud flat all the way from here to Tumwater, a mile and a half south. The mean rise and fall of the tide is a little over nine feet; the greatest difference between the
