Growing with the Douglas we find the white spruce, or “Sitka pine,” as it is sometimes called.  This also is a very beautiful and majestic tree, frequently attaining a height of two hundred feet or more and a diameter of five or six feet.  It is very abundant in southeastern Alaska, forming the greater part of the best forests there.  Here it is found mostly around the sides of beaver-dam and other meadows and on the borders of the streams, especially where the ground is low.  One tree that I saw felled at the head of the Hop-Ranch meadows on the upper Snoqualmie River, though far from being the largest I have seen, measured a hundred and eighty feet in length and four and a half in diameter, and was two hundred and fifty-seven years of age.

In habit and general appearance it resembles the Douglas spruce, but it is somewhat less slender and the needles grow close together all around the branchlets and are so stiff and sharp-pointed on the younger branches that they cannot well be handled without gloves.  The timber is tough, close-grained, white, and looks more like pine than any other of the spruces.  It splits freely, makes excellent shingles and in general use in house-building takes the place of pine.  I have seen logs of this species a hundred feet long and two feet in diameter at the upper end.  It was named in honor of the old Scotch botanist Archibald Menzies, who came to this coast with Vancouver in 1792[23].

The beautiful hemlock spruce with its warm yellow-green foliage is also common in some portions of these woods.  It is tall and slender and exceedingly graceful in habit before old age comes on, but the timber is inferior and is seldom used for any other than the roughest work, such as wharf-building.

The Western arbor-vitae[24] (Thuja gigantea) grows to a size truly gigantic on low rich ground.  Specimens ten feet in diameter and a hundred and forty feet high are not at all rare.  Some that I have heard of are said to be fifteen and even eighteen feet thick.  Clad in rich, glossy plumes, with gray lichens covering their smooth, tapering boles, perfect trees of this species are truly noble objects and well worthy the place they hold in these glorious forests.  It is of this tree that the Indians make their fine canoes.

Of the other conifers that are so happy as to have place here, there are three firs, three or four pines, two cypresses, a yew, and another spruce, the Abies Pattoniana[25].  This last is perhaps the most beautiful of all the spruces, but, being comparatively small and growing only far back on the mountains, it receives but little attention from most people.  Nor is there room in a work like this for anything like a complete description of it, or of the others I have just mentioned.  Of the three firs, one (Picea grandis)[26], grows near the coast and is one of the largest trees in the forest, sometimes attaining a height of two hundred and fifty feet.  The