Washington Territory Research Articles

Messages of the Governors of the Territory of Washington to the Legislative Assembly, 1854-1889.

Messages of the Governors of the Territory of Washington to the Legislative Assembly, 1854-1889.

Biology and Control of the Pea Weevil in the Palouse Area of Idaho and Washington1

The growing of dried peas for seed and commercial purposes has become a very profitable source of agricultural income in the Palouse territory of Washington and Idaho. At times, however, the crop is seriously damaged by the pea weevil, Bruchus pisorum (L.). The insect, through its feeding, makes the peas undesirable for human consumption; can reduce the germination to practically nothing, thus making the peas unfit for seed purposes; and renders the peas less valuable as stock feed.

Nebraska's First Unicameral Legislative Session

T MAY be fair to assume that the recent movement for unicameralism gained momentum and strength by reason of the adoption by Nebraska of a one-house legislature. The performance of bicameral state lawmaking bodies from 1930 to 1937 has been bewildering and discouraging to those interested in good government, to the extent that the demand for change is becoming more articulate and more insistent. The generous day-by-day newspaper publicity attendant upon the first session of the Nebraska singlechamber legislature, following closely every step of its operation, has not only stimulated a wide interest but also given courage to the advocates of unicameralism to attack the problem of simplification of the legislative system in various states. In an earlier period, particularly between 1911 and 1915, fifteen states, in one way or another, advocated the adoption of the unicameral system. Then followed a period of years when the question was in abeyance. After Nebraska passed its constitutional amendment in 1934, interest was again aroused. Several proposals for constitutional amendments creating onehouse legislatures were introduced in other states in 1935 and 1936; and in 1937 in twenty-two states 1 proposals or resolutions providing for study commissions were introduced in the legislatures. On September 3, 1937 President Roosevelt signed a Congressional act giving the people of the territory of 1Arkansas, California, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. Alaska opportunity to vote on a proposal for a one-house legislature at the next general election.

The Federal Land System in an Embryo State

Research Article| December 01 1935 The Federal Land System in an Embryo State Roy M. Robbins Roy M. Robbins Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (1935) 4 (4): 356–375. https://doi.org/10.2307/3634046 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Roy M. Robbins; The Federal Land System in an Embryo State. Pacific Historical Review 1 December 1935; 4 (4): 356–375. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3634046 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1935 The Arthur H. Clark Company Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

THE FRASER RIVER GOLD RUSH: AN IMMIGRANT LETTER OF 1858

THE FRASER RIVER GOLD RUSH AN IMMIGRANT LETTER OF 1868 Translated, and edited by C. A. Clausen INTRODUCTION In the spring of 1858 the news swept out from the north that a new El Dorado had been found along the bars of the Fraser and Thompson rivers of British Columbia. Naturally these tidings found eager listeners in California, where thousands of miners had been at work ever since the fabulous days of '49, only to find, as the decade drew to a close, that the rich placer deposits were rapidly being exhausted while their own pockets remained empty. In April the exodus from California started and it continued with evergrowing force through the following months. "It was at its height in June, when nearly ten thousand adventurers are said to have left San Francisco for the Fraser River; during the first ten days of July six thousand more sailed; it is estimated that the total number who came by land and water was between twenty-five and thirty thousand."1 The transports usually landed at Victoria, British Columbia . Then began the difficult part of the journey, since the gold-seekers had to ascend the rough and little-known Fraser River for about a hundred and sixty miles. "The firstcomers transported themselves as best they could. Some built boats for the journey; some hired Indians with their canoes; some obtained passage in a tramp ' plunger ' or sloop, to Langley and trusted to the future for the remainder of the way." 2 Still others crossed into American territory, as the following letter shows, in hopes of securing passage either 1 Fredric W. Howay, Early History 0/ the Fraser River Mines , vii (Victoria, 1926). "Howay, Fraser River Mines, viii. 47 48 STUDIES AND RECORDS by water or by land to the nearest bars along the Thompson River. The town of Whatcom, which " sprang up as if by magic" during the summer of 1858, did not develop into a great city as the hopes were then, but in time it was incorporated into the city of Bellingham, which has today a population of about thirty-five thousand. The letter translated below is that of a Norwegian immigrant who journeyed from San Francisco to Washington Territory in the summer of 1858 on his way to the gold mines. It was written at Whatcom just before he set out for the Fraser River and it was sent to Norway, where, about two and a half months later, it appeared in the Stavanger Amtstidende og Adresseavis. That the deposits along the Fraser and its tributaries proved to be very rich is well known. "For a time the placer mines of Cariboo repeated the history of California in 1849, and then came a gradual exhaustion, not, however, before some $50,000,000 worth of gold had been extracted." 3 The part played by the Norwegian immigrant letter- writer in this chapter of western mining history is unknown, however . Indeed, we do not know his name. He was a native of Bergen, and the letter itself discloses the fact that he had spent some time in San Francisco before he was caught by the current of the northern gold rush. It reveals him as a keen and interested observer of what he met in his new surroundings and as an intelligent recorder of what he observed. It gives a vivid picture of the gold rush in process and records the amazing effects of that rush upon a little frontier town that knew the stimulus of a sudden boom. Not the least interesting aspect of the letter is the fact that it was published in a Norwegian newspaper in the fall of 1858, thus giving a contemporary old-world community an opportunity to view through the letter-writer's eyes the strange scene that was being enacted in western America. 8 Encyclopedia Americana , 4:557 (revised edition, New York, 1929). FRASER RIVER GOLD RUSH 49 A transcript of the letter as published in the Stavanger newspaper was secured by Mr. Theodore C. Biegen in Norway in 1928-29. An Immigrant Letter of 1858 [Stavanger Amstidende og Adresseavis (Stavanger, Norway), September 30, 1858] Whatkom, Whatkom County, Washington Territory, July 12, 1858...

Some Geological Studies on Northwestern Washington and Adjacent British Territory

Some Geological Studies on Northwestern Washington and Adjacent British Territory

The Forests of Washington Territory

The Forests of Washington Territory

Graphic Field Notes for Areal Geology

Importance of Relations in Space to Geologic Studies. Some years ago a coal property in Washington territory was offered for sale by shrewd speculators, who valued the land at $1,100 an acre on account of the great thickness of workable coal said to occur in several veins. The property was not developed, but the number of coal beds and a total thickness of good coal of more than one hundred feet were confidently stated from exposures of the folded coal measures in a canon 400 feet deep, which traversed a plateau whereon glacial drift and primeval forest obscured the strata. Of these natural conditions the speculators skillfully took advantage; they opened the coal beds on the canon sides at points which were not intervisible, and they cut a labyrinth of paths through the forest leading from one opening to another. On the cliffs these paths were unpleasantly narrow; in the . . .

Scientific Serials

American Journal of Science, December.—The invisible solar and lunar spectrum, by S. P. Langley. This paper, which is an abstract of a memoir about to appear in the publications of the United States Academy of Sciences, summarizes the result of investigations carried on at the Allegheny Observatory in continuation of the author's previous researches on the infra-red of the solar spectrum to the extent of about three microns. By means of the improved apparatus here described, the extreme infra-red solar spectrum has now been searched from three to over eighteen microns; and it is shown that in this region the ratios between solar and lunar heat are completely changed from what they are in the visible spectrum. While the solar light in the latter is about 500,000 times that of moonlight, the solar heat received in the invisible part of the spectrum is probably less than 500 times the lunar. These studies also promise important results for meteorology, by opening to observation the hitherto unknown region of the spectrum, in which are to be found the nocturnal and diurnal radiations, not only from the moon towards the earth, but from the soil of the earth towards space.—A brief history of Taconic ideas, by James D. Dana. The Taconic question is here treated in chronological order from 1818 till the present year, in which the controversy may be regarded as practically closed. The conclusion is now firmly established that this system is not pre-Silurian, but merely another name for the older term “Lower Silurian.”—Certain generic electrical relations of alloys of platinum, by C. Barus. In this paper are given the chief results of the investigations on the measurement of high temperatures already described in vol. xxxv. p. 407, of the Journal. The results generally point to a limit below which, in the case of solid metals and at ordinary temperatures, neither electrical conductivity nor temperature-coefficient can be reduced. It thus appears that a lower limit of both conductivity and temperature-coefficient is among the conditions of metallic conduction, not to say of the metallic state absolutely.—On the Puget group of Washington Territory, by Charles A. White. A careful study of some fossil Mollusca from the coal-bearing formation in the Puget Sound basin, shows that they belong to a hitherto unknown brackish-water fauna, characterizing a deposit of unusual interest. A section of this formation measured at the town of Wilkeson gives a minimum thickness of no less than 13,200 feet, with a probable maximum of 14,500 feet. The surprise caused by the discovery of such an extraordinary thickness in an estuary deposit is increased by the fact that its Molluscan fauna appears to range vertically throughout the whole formation. The fauna itself seems to be of the same age, but distinct from, the Laramie, which flourished, not in an estuary, but in a land-locked basin. The area of the Puget group includes the Cascade Range, but is not otherwise yet clearly denned eastwards from the Pacific seaboard.—Papers are contributed by L. G. Eakins, on some sulphantimonites from Colorado; by A. E. Kenneliy, on the voltametric measurement of alternating Currents; by Dr. C. Hart Merriman, on the fauna of the Great Smoky Mountains, with description of a new species of red-backed mouse; by W. E. Hidden and J. B. Mackintosh, on anerlite, a new thorium mineral; and by O. C. Marsh, on a new family of horned Dinosaurians (Ceratops montanus) recently discovered in situ in the Laramie deposits of the Cretaceous period, in Montana, This reptile was a very formidable animal, armed not only with horns of great strength, but with a thick dermal hide, and varying in length from 25 to 30 feet.

On the Puget group of Washington Territory

On the Puget group of Washington Territory

Scientific Serials

American Journal of Science, October.—On a young tortoise with two heads, by E. H. Harbour. An account is given of a two-headed Chrysemys picta recently found near New Haven, Connecticut, and presenting some interesting physiological features. They appear to be two independent organisms inclosed in a common carapace, with separate and even antagonistic instincts and impulses, as shown in their struggles to move in opposite directions, in their independent breathing, sleeping and feeding at different times, and so on. They were still alive and vigorous on September 4, fourteen weeks after capture.—The structure of Florida, by Lawrence C. Johnson. In this paper, which was read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science at New York last year, the peninsula is divided longitudinally into four regions plainly marked by surface indications: (1) the Gulf Hammock in the west; (2) a central plain, or region of sinks; (3) the High Hammocks, or lake region; (4) the eastern slope, draining to the St. John's River.—Analysis of a soil from Washington Territory, with some remarks on the utility of soil analysis, by Edward A. Schneider. The specimens here analyzed are from the Rockland Ridge near “The Dalles” on the Columbia River. From this study the author infers that the action of hydrochloric acid on soils is far from uniform; that plant roots probably derive their nutrition from the finest sediments of the soil; that hydrochloric acid powerfully corrodes both the finest and coarsest sediments; that fertility largely depends not only on the quantity of phosphoric acid, but also on the mode of its occurrence, and that consequently the fertility of a soil cannot be determined by chemical analysis alone.—On the Rosetown extension of the Cortlandt series, by J. F, Kemp. The discovery of this extension of the well-known Cortlandt series is accredited to Dr. N. L. Britton, and the Rosetown area, due west of Stony Point, is here definitely circumscribed.—The contact-metamorphism produced in the adjoining mica-schists and limestones by the massive rocks of the Cortlandt series near Peekskill, New York, by George H. Williams. In previous papers were described the principal types and some intermediate varieties forming the complicated group of this series. Here the author deals with the unusual contact-metamorphism which they have occasioned in the adjoining schists and limestones, concluding with a summary of the evidence in favour of the eruptive origin of the massive members of the series.—The sedentary habits of Platyceras, by C. R. Keyes. The sedentary habits of this group of Palæozoic Gastropods is inferred from the analogous habits of their modern congeners, and from their attachment to various species of Crinoids during life.—On edisonite, a fourth form of titanic acid, by W. E. Hidden. The specimen here described is from the Whistnant gold mine, Polk County, California. Its analysis shows it to be a nearly pure TiO2, like rutile, but differing in its crystallization from the three previously known forms of that mineral.—On two new masses of meteoric iron, by George F. Kunz. The first of these specimens, from Linnville Mountain, North Carolina, closely resembles the Tazewell, Claiborne, and Bear Creek (Colorado) meteorites in composition; the second, from Laramie County, Wyoming, approaches nearer to those of Rowton, Charlotte, and Jewel Hill.—Experiments on the effect of magnetic force on the equipotential lines of an electric current (continued), by E. H. Hall. An account is here given of the author's experiments with cobalt, nickel, and bismuth, together with a summary of results.—W. Spring gives a further account of his views regarding the compression of powdered solids, in reply to Mr. Hallock; and E. S. Dana contributes a short preliminary notice of beryllonite, a new mineral so named by him from the fact that it contains the rare element beryllium.

An analysis of a soil from Washington Territory and some remarks on the utility of soil-analysis

An analysis of a soil from Washington Territory and some remarks on the utility of soil-analysis

Description of a new genus and species of fish, Acrotus willoughbyi, from Washington Territory

Description of a new genus and species of fish, Acrotus willoughbyi, from Washington Territory

THE COLIAS CONTROVERSY

It is to me a most distasteful task to take part publicly in the “Colias” controversy between Mr. Edwards and Dr. Hagen, as I was an invited guest of Dr. Hagen on the trip to Washington Territory, where the events took place which have given rise to the discussion; but in the interest of science, which seeks nothing but the truth, it seems as though the time had come when I ought to state in a concise manner what I know of the whole matter. I have been cut off from all my books for the last five months, while travelling from place to place, or this letter would have been written earlier. I did not know till quite recently the phase to which the controversy had arrived. Probably the best thing I can do is to state the manner in which our party was organized, and the manner in which our collecting was done.The party consisted of Dr. Hagen, and his assistant, Samuel Henshaw. In San Francisco I was invited to join it, and did so.

NOTES AND DESCRIPTIONS OF NORTH AMERICAN XYLOPHAGIDÆ AND STRATIOMYIDÆ

Xylophagus decorus, n. sp.♀. Length 13 mm. Black, legs yellow. Front convex, but little shining, thinly brownish dusted. Antennæ black, the tip of first joint and the second more reddish brown; elongate, the first joint rather longer than the distance from the insertion to the ocelli. Proboscis black Dorsum of thorax shining on the sides, in the middle with two broad brownish pollinose stripes, separated by a shining linear space. Pleuræ shining black. Abdomen blackish brown, shining. Legs, including the coxæ, reddish yellow, the tips of all the tarsi black. Wings nearly hyaline, a broad brownish band, near the middle, narrowed and evanescent posteriorly, the outer cross-veins clouded and the outer part of the wing cinereous.One specimen, Washington Territory (H. K. Morrison). The abdomen probably varies in depth of color.

On the Absence of Earthworms from the Prairies of the Canadian North-West

In NATURE of Jan. 3 (p. 213) Mr. Robert M. Christy writes on the absence of earthworms from the prairies of the North-West. I can confirm his statements, and extend them to cover the prairies of Kansas, the Indian Territory, Idaho, and Washington Territory. In all the above-mentioned territory of the United States the soil is more or less alkaline, and it seems to me that to this cause the absence of earthworms may be attributed. Ants and burrowing beetles, or the larvae of the latter, are, however, common, and no doubt do much service in the manufacture of plant-food, as well as in the destruction of decaying material. At Boise City, Idaho, some enthusiastic disciples of Izaak Walton imported and successfully reared the coveted bait for their fish-hooks in soil suited to the habitat of the Lumbricidae.

Notes on some fishes collected by James G. Swan in Washington Territory, including a new species of Macrurus

Notes on some fishes collected by James G. Swan in Washington Territory, including a new species of Macrurus

Notes on the volcanoes of northern California, Oregon, and Washington Territory

Notes on the volcanoes of northern California, Oregon, and Washington Territory

A List of Grasses from Washington Territory (Continued)

A List of Grasses from Washington Territory (Continued)

A List of Grasses from Washington Territory (Continued)

A List of Grasses from Washington Territory (Continued)