rs. Deciduous trees are few and not important.
Broad-leaved maples, cottonwoods, and alders are the principal species.

Higher up the mountain-slopes the forests thin and lessen in size, while
increasing in picturesqueness. The Douglas fir and other monsters of the
lower levels disappear, their places taken by other species. At an
altitude of four thousand feet the Englemann spruce and other
mountain-trees begin to appear, not in the massed ranks of the lower
levels, but in groves bordering the flowered opens.

The extreme limit of tree growth on Mount Rainier is about seven
thousand feet of altitude, above which one finds only occasional
distorted, wind-tortured mountain-hemlocks. There is no well-defined
timber-line, as on other lofty mountains. Avalanches and snow-slides
keep the upper levels swept and bare.

The wild-flower catalogue is too long to enumerate here. John Muir
expresses the belief that no other sub-alpine floral gardens excel
Rainier's in profusion and gorgeousness. The region differs little from
other Pacific regions of similar altitude in variety of species; in
luxuriance it is unsurpassed.

V

According to Theodore Winthrop who visited the northwest in 1853 and
published a book entitled "The Canoe and the Saddle," which had wide
vogue at the time and is consulted to-day, Mount Rainier had its Indian
Rip Van Winkle. The story was told him in great detail by Hamitchou, "a
frowsy ancient of the Squallyamish." The hero was a wise and wily
fisherman and hunter. Also, as his passion was gain, he became an
excellent business man. He always had salmon and berries when food
became scarce and prices high. Gradually he amassed large savings in
hiaqua, the little perforated shell which was the most valued form of
wampum, the Indian's money. The richer he got the stronger his passion
grew for hiaqua, and, when a spirit told him in a dream of vast hoards
at the summit of Rainier, he determined to climb the mountain. The
spirit was Tamanoues, which, Winthrop explains, is the vague Indian
personification of the supernatural.

So he threaded the forests and climbed the mountain's glistening side.
At the summit he looked over the rim into a large basin in the bottom of
which was a black lake surrounded by purple rock. At the lake's eastern
end stood three monuments. The first was as tall as a man and had a head
carved like a salmon; the second was the image of a camas-bulb; the two
represented the great nece