Category: Stories in Stone Blog

“In 1792, 1793, and 1794, the celebrated English navigator Vancouver, being sent out by government, explored, surveyed, and sounded the Strait of Juan of Fuca, to the head of Puget’s Sound, and every mile of all the intricate windings of this coast. It may be said without exaggeration, that, in the world, there is not to be found a more extensive and complex system of internal navigation. The labyrinth of bays, sounds, inlets, creeks, and harbours,–promontories, islands, and land tongues, with the countless sinuosities of land and water, show it to be a perfect network.”

John Dunn, History of the Oregon Territory and British North-American Fur Trade with an Account of the Habits and Customs of the Principal Native Tribes on the Northern Continent, London, Edwards and Hughes, 1846, pg. 298

“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.