The Cushman House 
LAKE GUSHMAN, WASH. 
Dec. 25, 1913. 
Dear Mr. Deane 
A Merry Christmas to you. Your greeting reached 
me yesterday, and I had better answer it while the spirit moves me. 
We sent the # boys to the State College at Pullman where they take 
the preparatory course, practically % High School work. Pullman 
is just on the Idaho line and a little south of Spokane. 
We left Seattle in the morning and climbed the Cascades through 
the Green River valley, on the D. P. Py. The scenery on the west 
side is very tame after one has seen as much of the mountains &s 
I have here and in the Canadian Rockies. On the other side we run 
down the valley of the Yakima. The first thing I noticed was that 
the limbs on all the trees reached down the hill, wind, I have seen 
the same thing on the straits of Puca. It is a dry country on the 
other side, and when I saw it brown and bare, as the harvest was 
nearly all ofeer* We decided to stop to stop over a train in Ellens— 
burg where we have some friends, and we had not gone a block up 
tpwn when we met them in a car. We were promptly bundled in and 
run all over the valley. 
It was my first experience with an irrigated country, we could see 
the ditch from the train as we came in to the neighborhood, now a 
narrow canal dug along the hillside and often a flume built of 
heavy lumber. Sometimes it was hung on hangers from the sides of 
the cliffs. Ellensburg is a nice little town in a good farming 
country devoted to dairying, fruit alfalfa and some potatoes,etc. 
They have wonderful peaches there. But, oh the wind. They told me 
it was not blowing that day, but the only way I could keep my hat 
