Lake Cushman, Washington 
March 5, 1916. 
My dear Mr. Deane 
I wish you would pray for a Chinook on my behalf. 
Now if you have a real good up-to-date dictionary you will find 
that this is a tribe of Indians, a variety of salmon, a wind, a 
kind of saw, a language or dialect, and very possibly a lot of 
other things, and you may wonder which I want. It is the wind. 
January was one continual snowstorm, net very much at a time but 
a little every day, and Feb. started in worse than that. The 2nd. 
we had a regular blizzard, not cold, but snowing hard and drifting 
and by the 4th. we had 64 ins. While not the worst storm I have 
seen here, it did more damage through the state than any previous 
one, mainly because it had more to work on, the last great storm 
being in '93 when the population of the state was much less and 
there were fewer railroads. Seattle was brought up standing. Hun¬ 
dreds of automobiles were left standing in the streets, the cars 
were put out of business entirely, and many stores did ncy attempt 
to open. A slide on the G. N. Ry. swept a train into a canyon and 
eight lives were lost in almost the same place where a few years 
ago the same thing .happened and 90 o d were killed. The dome of 
the catholic cathedral was crushed in by the weight of snow, and 
many buildings throughout the state were crushed. 
Here we suffered slightly. Short of feed/I had to butcher 
some hogs on which I depended for my P. P. business for a month or 
more, and I lost two small buildings, but it took a lot of work to 
take care of them all and get round to do it. All communication 
*" r ith the outside was by snowshoes, and we got no mail but the letters 
arid some papers till I took the matter into my own hands and broke 
the road so the mail carrier could have no excuse for not bringing 
