Quote 3 – Ideal Sacrilege

“This tree of deep and secure harbors, whose trunk, Admiralty Inlet…surprised its Spanish, American, and British explorers with suddenly-discovered little harbors, like hidden fruit among thick leaves–quiet, lovely nooks, embosomed in green woods…And they are the loveliest bits of creation. Would that I had the wealth to covenant with man never to bring into these paradises of harbors the axe! The ideal sacrilege of chopping the Garden of Eden to feed a saw-mill is realized daily here by the remorseless Americans who feed the hungry gangs of the Sound mills with the king tree and the queen trees of the world.”

Samuel Wilkeson, Wilkeson’s Notes on Puget Sound–Being Extracts from Notes by Samuel Wilkeson on a Reconnoissance of the Proposed Route of the Northern Pacific Railroad Made in the Summer of 1869.

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