Of the lakes there are said to be some thirty in King’s County alone; the largest, Lake Washington, being twenty-six miles long and four miles wide.  Another, which enjoys the duckish name of Lake Squak, is about ten miles long.  Both are pure and beautiful, lying imbedded in the green wilderness.  The rivers are numerous and are but little affected by the weather, flowing with deep, steady currents the year round.  They are short, however, none of them drawing their sources from beyond the Cascade Range.  Some are navigable for small steamers on their lower courses, but the openings they make in the woods are very narrow, the tall trees on their banks leaning over in some places, making fine shady tunnels.

The largest of the prairies that I have seen lies to the south of Tacoma on the line of the Portland and Tacoma Railroad.  The ground is dry and gravelly, a deposit of water-washed cobbles and pebbles derived from moraines—­conditions which readily explain the absence of trees here and on other prairies adjacent to Yelm.  Berries grow in lavish abundance, enough for man and beast with thousands of tons to spare.  The woods are full of them, especially about the borders of the waters and meadows where the sunshine may enter.  Nowhere in the north does Nature set a more bountiful table.  There are huckleberries of many species, red, blue, and black, some of them growing close to the ground, others on bushes eight to ten feet high; also salal berries, growing on a low, weak-stemmed bush, a species of gaultheria, seldom more than a foot or two high.  This has pale pea-green glossy leaves two or three inches long and half an inch wide and beautiful pink flowers, urn-shaped, that make a fine, rich show.  The berries are black when ripe, are extremely abundant, and, with the huckleberries, form an important part of the food of the Indians, who beat them into paste, dry them, and store them away for winter use, to be eaten with their oily fish.  The salmon-berry also is very plentiful, growing in dense prickly tangles.  The flowers are as large as wild roses and of the same color, and the berries measure nearly an inch in diameter.  Besides these there are gooseberries, currants, raspberries, blackberries, and, in some favored spots, strawberries.  The mass of the underbrush of the woods is made up in great part of these berry-bearing bushes.  Together with white-flowered spiraea twenty feet high, hazel, dogwood, wild rose, honeysuckle, symphoricarpus, etc.  But in the depths of the woods, where little sunshine can reach the ground, there is but little underbrush of any kind, only a very light growth of huckleberry and rubus and young maples in most places.  The difficulties encountered by the explorer in penetrating the wilderness are presented mostly by the streams and bogs, with their tangled margins, and the fallen timber and thick carpet of moss covering all the ground.