The last chapter was somewhere about Tacoma and the mountain and I have finished school for a vacation and have been too busy to write very much as I have a new horse and ride every day. It is hard to write in hot days. Centralia is the town where the I. W. W. fellows shot the soldier boys on Armistice Day when they were parading on the street. They showed us the old hall where the I. W. W.'s met which the soldier boys burned down to drive them out. It is pretty badly burned and nearly fell down. After it was burned they got another place to meet at the Roderick Hotel and when the boys were marching down the street, the I. W. W. fellows shot from their room in this hotel and from the other hotel across the street and from the hill beyond the railroad. We took pictures of these buildings.

The I. W. W. fellows said the soldiers tried to break into their rooms before they shot at them but the soldiers said they did not. Warren Grim was the first boy shot. His sister lives there yet. Some of the people blame the lawyer for telling the I. W. W. fellows to shoot if anybody bothered them. There is a lot of bad feeling there about it and they don't talk much about it if they can help it, as some of them take sides. We went around the big mills but you don't hear much about the I. W. W. now.

Mr. Caldwell was the manager of some of the biggest mills at Gray's Harbor where the I. W. W. trouble was the worst, and he said there was two sides to the trouble with the men. He said the men were not well-treated by the big lumber mills, which was the cause of the men joining the I. W. W., but they got a law to have better camps and now they did not have any more trouble.

It rains there nearly all the time and the men get wet and now they must have places to dry their clothes at night and dry beds to sleep in which they did not have before. Some of the biggest mills in the United States are here. Mr. Donovan's is one of the big mills; some of the logs they saw on his mill are 10 and 12 feet across the end. One mill at Hoquiam had more than one hundred million feet of lumber in their yards.

Gray's Harbor houses have moss on the roofs caused by so much rain. It is the wettest place in the United States. But it is a mighty live town and full of fine people too; you can get the best clams and salmon but their oysters are so little you can take ten at a bite. They ship lumber on ships to China and through the Panama Canal. They told us some of the big trees make a hundred thousand feet of lumber. Mr. Donovan is sure a fine man.

We drove up to Olympia one evening and it was clear so we could see the mountain when the sun was going down. I never saw such a sight before and it was grand. It was 65 miles away but it did not look more than 10 miles. It stuck up far above everything and it looked white at first and in the twilight it turned pink and then blue and then got darker and darker until it got so dark we could not see it at all.

They began a big capitol building years ago and got the foundation built and then got into political trouble and quit. The town is on the edge of the sound like Tacoma and they have a falls called Tumwater Falls and it is where the first settlers in the state built their homes.

We went out one day to see the oldest farm east of Chehalis. Here is the old log house where Genral [sic] Grant stayed one winter when he was a young man. It also was the first court house and it was a fort in the early days. The farm is now owned by Mr. Mercer, a descendant of General Hugh Mercer. It was a Hudson Bay trading post too.

One day we went to see the giant tree which is owned by Mr. Galvin, the biggest tree in the state. Aunt Rose and Uncle John took us for a camping trip on Lincoln creek where it is, in the big woods which he had never seen before. The Finlanders settled up in that country and they are going to build a state road all the way up the valley but now the road is not very good so we could not go very fast.

The big tree stands just beside a mountain stream and there are a lot of other big trees near it and ferns so high that you can't take a picture of it.

The tree is about a hundred and fifty feet high and is almost 39 feet around. Dad and Uncle John measured it and the mill superintendent counted it up and said it had one hundred and fourteen thousand feet of lumber in it. It is a beautiful place for a park and Dad asked the Governor to have the state take it for a public park so it would be preserved so that it would not be cut down for lumber. Uncle John said he would let the state have it if they would make it a park.*

This is the place where sister Bart was visiting her cousin Mary and we sure did have a good time there. They live in a fine bungalow and have a car and own nearly all the timber around there. Mr. Fowler lives there and Mr. Caldwell and mother's aunt Susan Slack. She is over 80 years but is out every day in her car for a ride. The Caldwell girls did some fine playing and dancing for us. I am so sleepy I have to quit for tonight and the next letter will be about Portland and Columbia Drive.

[*Note - This booklet was published as a serial (titled "The Boy Scout") in the publication In The Open. At the end of this chapter, which appeared sometime after June 15, 1921, was the following Editor's Note:   It is too bad that the pictures illustrating this installment reached us too late for publication. Every Pennsylvanian will feel ashamed to learn, after our many and so far vain efforts to save the Cook Forest, that Maj McCreight merely had to suggest the saving of this big tree to the Governor of Washington to secure his active help and that the tree is now sure of being preserved for posterity with a park around it containing many almost as large. What a comparison with our Pennsylvania executives, who have failed so far to grasp the opportunity to immortalize and endear themselves to posterity, by preserving the last of "Penn's Woods", the great Cook Forest.]