The grueling, mountain-carving work of mapping the Puget Sound
A survey crew spends the summer hacking paths through the dense, uncharted forests of the Olympic Peninsula and Straits of Fuca to measure the rugged frontier.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Captain Jas. S. Lawson’s coast survey party, with the schooner Fauntleroy, Captain Willoughby master, arrived in Olympia harbor on Saturday night from down Sound to go into quarters for the winter. The party has been engaged during the summer in the Straits of Fuca, on both the American and English sides, from Neah Bay to Discovery Island. The work has been very hard and tedious, made more so by disagreeable and rainy weather almost all the season. The party have been taking measurements and observations on land as well as water, these extending in some instances as far as four miles up the heavily wooded mountain sides, where mules had to be employed to convey their instruments, tents, provisions and baggage. At one place, a stretch 45 feet wide and two miles long had to be cut through the thick timber to get observations for their instruments; and at others they had to climb up the steep and almost perpendicular mountain sides and carry everything on their backs. Everything has been housed for the winter, and the men were paid off on Thursday.
“At one place, a stretch 45 feet wide and two miles long had to be cut through the thick timber to get observations for their instruments.”
Modern hikers on the Olympic Peninsula often take well-maintained trails for granted, but this account reveals the brutal labor required to survey the landscape. The sheer physical toll of hacking two-mile lines through 'thick timber' reminds us that the foundational maps of Washington were bought with immense human struggle.
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