ur
return.

[Illustration: A lesson in the art of clam baking.]

CHAPTER ELEVEN

HUNTING FOR ANOTHER HOME SITE

OUR enjoyment of this first home did not last long. Hardly were we
fairly settled, when news came that unsettled us again.

In April of 1853, the word had begun to pass around that we were to have
a new Territory to embrace the country north of the Columbia River. Its
capital was to be on Puget Sound. Here on the Columbia we should be away
off to one side, out of touch with the people who would shortly become a
great separate commonwealth.

It seemed advisable to look about a little, before making the move; so
leaving the little wife and baby in the cabin home one bright morning in
May, Oliver and I each made a pack of forty pounds and took the trail,
bound for Puget Sound. We camped where night overtook us, sleeping in
the open air without shelter or cover other than that afforded by some
friendly tree with drooping limbs.

Our trail first led us down near the right bank of the Columbia to the
Cowlitz, thence up the latter river thirty miles or more, and then
across the country nearly sixty miles to Olympia.

At this time there might have been, about Puget Sound, two thousand
white people all told, while now there are nearer a million. But these
people were so scattered we did not realize there were even that number,
for the Puget Sound country is a big place--more than two hundred miles
long and seventy-five miles wide--between two mountain ranges, with the
Cascades on the east and the Olympics on the west. The waters of the
Sound, including all the channels and bays and inlets and shores of
forty islands, make more than sixteen hundred miles of shore
line--nearly as many miles as the Oregon Trail is long; that is, almost
as many miles as we had the previous year traversed from the Missouri
River to the Sound.

Our expectations had been raised high by the glowing accounts of Puget
Sound. But a feeling of deep disappointment fell upon us when we could
see in the foreground only bare, dismal mud flats, and beyond these a
channel scarcely twice as wide as that of the great river we had left,
bounded on either side by high, heavily timbered land. We wished
ourselves back at our cabin on the Columbia.

Should we turn around and go back? No; we had never done that since
leaving our Indiana home. But what was the use of stopping here? We
wanted a place to make a farm, and we could not do