CHAPTER XXIV.
THE WASHINGTON COAST.
In order to visit the two most important points on the coast of Washington Territory, we will return to the Columbia River and Astoria. Crossing over by the mail-steamer to Baker's Bay, we find a stage awaiting us by which we are to be conveyed to Oysterville on Shoalwater Bay. The entrance to this bay is twenty-seven miles north of the Columbia, though it extends down to within three or four miles of Baker's Bay, leaving a long strip of land, from one to one and a half miles in width, between itself and the ocean. It is on this long peninsula that Oysterville is situated, and the drive to it is along the beach nearly the whole distance. Of a fine summer's day the excursion is an exhilarating one. The town is upon the inside of the peninsula, and fronts the bay and the main-land opposite. Its distance below the entrance to the bay is about eight miles.
Although the county-seat of Pacific County, and, like Port Townsend, a place for the receipt of customs, it is but a small village, and depends on the oyster trade for its chief support. The annual shipment of oysters to San Francisco is estimated at forty thousand baskets. Quite a number of visitors may be found here in the summer, who come to the coast to escape the heat of the valleys in the months of July and August. The drive on the beach, and the privi-
