One ship, the _G. W. Kendall_, was sent from San Francisco to Puget Sound for ice. It is needless to say the captain did not get a cargo of that luxury; he reported that water did not freeze in Puget Sound and consoled the owner of the ship by returning with a valuable cargo of piles. The cutting of logs to build houses and the grubbing of stumps to clear the land for gardens alternated with the cutting of piles. In the clearing of land, the Indians proved a great assistance; far from being lazy many of them were hard workers and would dig and delve day after day to remove the immense stumps of cedar and fir left after cutting the great trees. The settlers burned many by piling heaps of logs and brush on them, others by boring holes far into the wood and setting fire, while some were rent by charges of powder when it could be afforded. The clearing of land in this heavily timbered country was an item of large expense if hired, otherwise of much arduous toil for the owner. The women and children often helped to pile brush and set fires and many a merry party turned out at night to "chunk up" the blazing heaps; after nightfall, their fire-lit figure flitting hither and yon against the purple darkness, suggested well-intentioned witches. Cutting down the tall trees, from two hundred fifty to four hundred fifty feet, required considerable care and skill. Sometimes we felt the pathos of it all, when a huge giant, the dignified product of patient centuries of growth, fell crashing, groaning to the earth. This side of the subject, is presented in a poem "The Lone Fir Tree," not included in this volume. When finally the small patches of land were cleared, planted and tended, the returns were astonishing, such marvelous vegetables, small fruits and flowers, abundant and luxuriant, rewarded the toiler. Nature herself, by her heaps of vegetation, had foreshown the immense productiveness of the soil. In the river valleys were quite extensive prairies, which afforded superior stock range, but the main dependence of the people was in the timber. In 1852 H. L. Yesler came, who built the first steam sawmill on Puget Sound, at Seattle. Other mills sprang up at Port Ludlow, Port Gamble, Port Madison and Port Blakely, making the names of Meigs, Pope, Talbot, Keller, Renton, Walker, Blinn and others, great in the annals of sawmilling on Puget Sound. This very interesting account concerning Yesler's sawmill and those who worked in it in the early days was first published in a Seattle paper many years ago: