IN THE BEGINING, there was the forest. It covered all the land with a thick stand of fire, hemlock, cedar, pine, alder and other trees. The undergrowth of salal, huckleberry, ferns and other brush was nearly impenetrable. It came to the shores of the water, where the miles of shoreline and turning inlets gave access to its deepest corners.

David Shelton was the first to choose a tract of level ground in the half-mile wide Cota Valley, where a small stream drained into a narrow arm of Puget Sound about 20 miles northwest of Olympia in the new Washington Territory.