The Roses of December: A Seattle Winter's Tale

A person, known to be Miss Kate J. Rollins, has written the following to the Columbia Dispatch: Seattle, March 17, 1885. Here again: Not from foreign lands, but from the far and beautiful shores of Puget Sound, where snow-capped mountains and virgin forests combine with the Sound itself and the but lovely lakes to make the most magnificent scenery that can be found by traveling this wide world around! I plucked most beautiful roses from the June bushes down in the garden of my Seattle home about the middle of December, just before the one snowstorm of the winter, and that snow was a marvel in that region, for it laid on the ground two weeks, something which has never happened there before since 1859. There was but one sleigh in the city—that was a rich man's whim—so they constructed sleighs by taking wash-tubs and boxes and attaching them to runners made of barrel staves. All the city, youthful and adult, were out upon the street, and there were really the most comical arrangements used as sleighs that you can imagine. The 'south wind' blew one night and the rains fell, and in the morning not a trace of snow was visible; the green grass grew all around, and I went out into the garden and gathered a handful of English violets that had been concealed under the snow! What is needed in Western Washington is capital to develop its resources and to establish manufactures, when it will become a Mecca for miners, mechanics, and other workingmen. But all along through Eastern Washington, Montana, and Dakota is the poor man's paradise, providing only that he is willing to work; for a man cannot even raise a crop of wheat on a Dakota prairie without some work. He must use his brain, too, as well as his muscle.