Dr. Tolmie, Chief Factor of the Puget Sound Agricultural Company at Fort Nisqually, quickly seized the opportunity to demand rent from the United States for the occupancy of the site of Fort Steilacoom, of six hundred dollars a year, and actually received it for fifteen years and until the final award was made extinguishing the claims of his company. We found the plains alive with this company's stock (many thousand head) running at large and fattened upon the scant but nutritious grass growing upon the adjacent prairie and glade lands.
Balch and Webber were doing a thriving trade in their store at the little town of Steilacoom, besides their shipping trade of piles and square timber, shingles, lumber, cord wood, hides, furs, fish, and other odds and ends. Just across the street from their store stood the main hotel of the place with the unique history of being the only building erected on Puget Sound from lumber shipped from the eastern seaboard. Captain Balch brought the building with him from Maine, ready to set up. At the upper town Philip Keach was merchandising while Abner Martin kept a hotel. Intense rivalry ran between the two towns in the early days when we were at Steilacoom.
Thomas M. Chambers, father of the prominent members of the Olympia community of that name, had built a saw-mill on Steilacoom creek, two miles from the town, and a grist mill where farmers oftentimes came with pebbles in their wheat to dull the burrs.
We are wont now to speak of this place as "poor old Steilacoom," with its tumbled-down houses, rotting sidewalks and decayed wharves; the last vestige of the latter of which has disappeared; but then everything was new, with an air of business bustle that made one feel here was a center of trade. The sight of those seven vessels lying in the offing made a profound impression upon our minds. We had never before seen so many ships at one place as were quietly lying at anchor in front of the embryo city. Curiously enough, here was the very identical vessel we had first seen on the Willamette River, the bark "Mary Melville," with her gruff mate and big hearted master, Capt. Barston, with whom the reader has been made acquainted in a previous chapter. I took no special note of the names of these vessels other than this one, but from the columns of the Columbian I am able to glean the names of twenty-two vessels, brigs, barks, and schooners, then plying between Puget Sound and San Francisco, which are as follows: