20 
BOTANY OF THE ROUTE. 
them.* Naturally they produce luxuriant crops 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 harm. 
Such tide prairies are most extensive about Shoalwater 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 usually 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 
thejnountains. 
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 narrow 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 bay. “I was 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 Geology.) 
