Coal shipments from the port of Tacoma average twenty-seven thousand tons a month, being the product of mines situated in the region immediately tributary to the city and along the line of the Northern Pacific. These mines are owned and operated by the Carbon Hill Coal Co., the Wilkeson Coal and Coke Co., the Tacoma Coal Co., the South Prairie Coal Co., all in the Puyallup region, and the Bucoda Coal Co., south of the city. Nearly all these shipments go by sail and steamer to the San Francisco market. The Durham coal mines, sixty miles east of Tacoma, are just being opened, and provision is being made for a daily output of three hundred tons. This is fine coking coal, and will be used by the great iron smelters to be erected at Cle Elum. The mine is the property of the Pacific Investment Co. At Roslyn, on the east side of the mountains, are the mines of the Northern Pacific Coal Co., whose headquarters are in this city. Inexhaustible in quantity, and much of it making the finest quality of coke, the coal deposits about Tacoma must build up a very large city here. Iron ore of a superior quality lies in immense and easily accessible deposits almost at the city’s gate. Coal, coke and iron, with limestone in abundance, suggest the great manufacturing possibilities, to take advantage of which an immense enterprise is already on foot, in the form of a gigantic iron smelting plant, to be erected at Cle Elum, near the Roslyn mines, by the Moss Bay Iron Co., one of the largest institutions of its kind in England, and the huge reduction works soon to be erected at Tacoma by a company recently organized for that purpose. [Illustration: HOTEL FIFE--TACOMA. FARRELL & DARMER, ARCHITECTS.] LUMBER INTERESTS OF TACOMA.