of
the Snohomish, at the point of contact of the Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern, and near Lake Stevens, a beautiful sheet of water. Lumbering is the great industry at present, but I hear a good deal about mines of coal and of silver in the neighborhood.
Cathcart, Lowell, and Marysville are milling-towns on the river below Snohomish. The river is crooked and not wide, with low banks which must be overflowed in some seasons. It parts into several channels five or six miles from Port Gardiner, into which it flows by three mouths. On the north side of the entrance is the Tulalip Indian reservation, including thirty-eight square miles of excellent land. On the south side of Port Gardiner is Muckilteo, a fish-canning establishment.
I have not taken pains to collect any information about the salmon fisheries of the Sound, which are in their general features the same as those of the Columbia. But the variety of food fishes in the Sound is much greater than in the great freshwater river. Halibut and codfish are plentiful, as well as smaller fish, such as smelt and herring, but the business of packing them has not seemed to attract capital. The only company 1 heard of was one on Scow Bay, Port Townsend, and they were professional fishermen from Massachusetts who had recently set up this establishment. They experimented by sending a refrigerator car to Hew York packed with halibut on ice, and, finding it practicable, went into the business. Oysters are successfully grown in the Sound, and clams of half a dozen varieties are native. Lobsters have been planted by the government, as also carp and shad. This by way of parenthesis.
Tw r elve or fifteen miles north of the Snohomish, the Stillaquamish River enters that part of the Sound called Port Susan by Vancouver. It was somewhere about here, perhaps on the south shore of Port Gardner, that on the king's birthday, June 4, 1792, Vancouver took formal possession of this region for his Majesty,—hence the name "Possession Sound," given to the eastern arm of this wonderful sea, which is no sound at all.
Edmunds is the seaport town of Snohomish County, and only four years old. It boasts many advantages.
On the Stillaquamish is one town—Stanwood—of considerable consequence as a milling and trading centre for that valley. Marysville is also a thriving place. Centreville is older, but
