The S'kokomish Reservation is at the extreme southwestern corner of the
Puget Sound, where the S'kokomish River empties in, and is three miles
square, with five thousand acres, embracing rich bottom land and
mountain timber land, the river and the sound furnishing the best means
of transportation to the market. On the place I measured the stumps of
red cedar that were eight, ten and twelve feet in diameter. The waters
at hand are of the best for fishing. As we--Mrs. Roy was with me--were
going up from the river where we had been set across after a ten-mile
mountain drive from Shelton, we saw a Mr. Lo lugging a three-foot
salmon into the missionary home; and at Olympia, the capital, and
another point on the sound, the fishmonger told us they did not sell
such fish by the pound, but by the piece, twenty-five cents each. When,
in 1855, this reservation was set apart by the treaty, it was for the
three bands of this tribe and for the Clallams up at the entrance of
the Sound, who, because of variance with one of the other bands, never
left their ancestral habitation to go to the selected spot. The people
belonging to the Reservation now number about six hundred and twenty.

The handling of the Indians here was one of the first fruits of
President Grant's Peace Policy, by which the agencies were assigned to
the several missionary societies, which were to nominate their
respective agents. This was one of those which were assigned to the
American Missionary Association. In 1871 the Association nominated to
this Agency Edwin Eells, Esq., the eldest son of Rev. Gushing Eells,
D.D., who was one of the mission band that crossed the Rocky Mountains
in 1838, under commission of the American Board, to be associated with
Dr. Marcus Whitman's series of Indian Missions. Here is an illustration
of the wisdom of that policy, which has secured a highly successful
management in all the secular, educational and religious affairs of the