20 BOTANY OF THE IlOtTE. 



them.* Naturally they produce luxuriaut crojjs of grass from two to four feet high and of fine 

 quality, which is green all summer, affording excellent pasturage at the very time when the 

 upland prairies are dry and parched. The floods that do occur are in winter, when they do 

 little barm. 



Such tide prairies are most extensive about Shoal water bay and near the Straits of Fuca. 

 They are less extensive up the sound and on the Columbia and Chehalis, where the water is 

 fresher, and are often covered with a dense growth of small spruces, crab-apple, and other 

 bushes. 



Ascending through these to the waters entirely fresh, we find on the Upper Chehalis and 

 Columbia, near Vancouver, tracts of meadow lying below the line of summer inundation, and 

 therefore overflowed in many years from June to August. This has been the greatest obstacle 

 to their cultivation, until the plan was adopted of waiting for the floods to subside, after which 

 crops are found to flourish quite as well as if put in the ground earlier. Embanking is only 

 partially successful, as the water soaks up from below. In most years, however, the flood 

 produced by the melting snows is so short and partial as to be of more service than injury. 

 The soil is very productive, and most of the plants similar to those of the tide lands. Between 

 these meadows and the rivers there is usuall}'' a ridge, rarely overflowed, and covered with 

 trees, which conceal the view of the prairies from the water. The absence of trees is on all 

 these evidently due to their occasional inundation either by salt water or the ice-cold flood from 

 the mountains. 



Small prairies, constantly marshy from springs, are found about the heads of rivers, especially 

 among the mountain summits, which produce either a tall, coarse grass, or, where drier, are 

 covered with thickets of low bushes. Such are the cranberry marshes along the coast, where 

 we find precisely the same group of plants as on the mountains 5,000 feet higher, as well as in 

 the most northern parts of this continent and other parts of the world. 



The next and a more interesting kind of prairies consists of those which are constantly dry. 

 These are perhaps less rich than the preceding, though varying in this respect. The best are 

 those occupying the river bottoms about Shoalwater bay, the Chehalis, and small rivers run- 

 ning into Puget Sound. On Whidby's island, and other places adjoining the Straits of Fuca, 

 are similar rich prairies, with the appearance of having been formed by a similar alluvial 

 deposit from rivers, though now more than a hundred feet above the water. The rich, black 

 soil is on all these from one to three feet deep, and almost entirely vegetable in composition. 

 It of course produces everything adapted to the climate in luxuriant profusion, though often 

 too rich for grain, especially in the moist climate west of the Coast range. Prairies, with a 

 drier and poorer soil, exist in a nari'ow strip along the sandy sea-beach, and at an elevation of 

 several hundred feet above tide-water about the head of Puget Sound, where their soil is 

 either sandy or gravelly, producing the same plants as those near the sea-beach, and mostly 

 quite different from those of the rich alluvium. 



I give some extracts from my notes to show the general appearance of these prairies at 

 different seasons, and at the same time some idea of out-door life in the Territory. 



March 26, 1854, I made an excursion in a sailboat up the Willopah, a river running into the 

 north end of Shoalwater baj^ "I v^as more pleased with this little river and its valley than 

 with any I had yet seen. It has not, of course, the grandeur of the Columbia, but the variety 



*In Nova Scotia lands precisely similar, but more subject to overflow, form the best agricultural tracts of the province. — 

 (Dawson's Acadian Qeology.) 



