SPOKANE was a long time aborning. So too was the county in which it lay; and for that matter, the state of Washington. While California was experiencing the gold rush of ‘49 and immigrants came in a swelling stream over the Oregon Trail to make homes for themselves in the fertile valley of the Willamette, the bunchgrass still waved serene over the Spokane country. Walla Walla, way station for covered wagons and the mining stampede into Idaho and Montana in the sixties, became a thriving city, largest in the interior between the Rockies and the Cascades. But there was no Spokane. In fact, up to the seventies, there was not even a Spokane Falls, that is, in the way of a settlement. To most people in the United States the entire area was a vague “somewhere way up in the Northwest,” an unsurveyed wilderness on the map of Washington Territory.
Not that the physical contours of what was to become the heart of the “Inland Empire”{41} were wholly unknown to a few scientists and explorers and the ubiquitous fur traders; nor had its more obvious resources failed to make an impression on the handful of hardy souls who had traversed its limitless acres on missionary errands. Lewis and Clark, on their way west, ran into the Bitterroot mountains, those barriers so effectively rimming the eastern approaches to the Empire that it was three-quarters of a century before a locomotive got through. They became acquainted with the turgid waters of the Snake as it threaded its wild cañons to join the Columbia at a spot just above the present Wallula.{42} On the return trip they fell in with Coeur d’Alene Indians who said their home was at the falls of a river rising in a beautiful lake and flowing into the Columbia from the east—the Spokane River, though not yet known by that name.
Ross Cox had wandered northward for days over the rolling, grass-clad hills of the Palouse{43} where today’s “flying farmers” survey from their planes what they boast to be the breadbasket of the world: countless acres of golden wheat interspersed with huge fields of peas, and green valleys punctuated with commodious ranch homes and thriving communities.
The Big Bend of the Columbia where the river describes a great arc above the mouth of the Snake was familiar to the fur trade as was the plateau it circled. This plateau, they learned, was a patchwork of glacier-scraped scabland, open bunchgrass prairie spotted with sagebrush and oases of green in gullies and about potholes or small, shallow lakes filled in spring by the melting snow and progressively disappearing in summer. On the plateau, according to early reports, grazed immense herds of mountain sheep and goats. Later, antelope were frequently mentioned.
The fur traders saw and marveled at the Grand Coulee, a silt-floored cañon leading away from the Columbia, its bottom a natural garden between walls of basalt towering in places as high as eight hundred to a thousand feet. That the Coulee was an age-old river channel formed when glacial ice blocked the mighty Columbia they probably never guessed. As they urged their ponies through the belly-high bunchgrass of this gash in the plateau it is certain they could not have envisioned the twenty-five mile length of the upper Coulee as an irrigation reservoir for today’s so-called Columbia River Basin Project. Nor did they foresee a future concrete dam, largest man-made structure in the world, spanning the Columbia just above the entrance to the Coulee and generating power to lift water nearly three hundred feet to the reservoir, besides supplying electric current to hundreds of industries, villages, and farms.{44}
These same traders knew the open, piny woods on the northern and eastern fringes of the Palouse and the Big Bend. They hunted the at times almost impenetrable forests of cedar, fir, and pine clothing the mountains into which the open woods led. They trapped the chain of mountain lakes deep-set in those forests. They followed the course of the Spokane River through its broad upper valley and lower rocky gorges to where it joined the Columbia—and probably mourned the recurrent cascades and churning falls that unfitted the stream for purposes of transportation. How much easier to bring the winter’s pack of furs down to Spokane House if only a bateau could navigate the swift-flowing Spokane!
Occasionally in their roving careers the hunters picked golden nuggets out of the gravel of the mountain streams and the sands along the Columbia. Or they bought them of the Indians. Someday, perhaps, placer miners with pick and pan would come to glean a precarious living from this same sand and gravel. But not now; fur was today’s wealth.
Exploring parties and men of science sent by government also noted in their reports obvious evidences of mineral wealth. Mary Richardson Walker had furnished some of them with samples. Nevertheless, it was not until the sixties that the physical barriers partitioning the slowly emerging Empire from the rest of the world began to become a lure instead of an obstacle. Gold discoveries at that time along the tributaries of the Snake in Idaho and in the eighties in the Coeur d’Alenes started stampedes as prolific of thrills as the best of the earlier rushes into California.
As the story of Spokane House has indicated, the residents experimented with gardening. This had also been true at Fort Colville and at the Tshimakain mission. Spokane Garry had carried farming a good deal further. The climate was propitious, and wherever there was water, the soil was wondrously fertile.
The fur traders even experimented in à small way with grazing. If Indian ponies could live on the dried-up grasses of fall and winter, perhaps cattle could—and sheep. As early as 1826 Doctor McLoughlin of the Hudson’s Bay Company sent members of his carefully nurtured herd at Vancouver to Colville. Sheep came too, and both did well. As for horses, all that was necessary was to breed the ponies and turn them out as the Indians did.
These experiments on the part of the fur trade were not, however, carried on with an eye to the extensive development of natural resources or the encouragement of settlement. Far from it. Settlement would be their ruin; for as human population increased, the wild population on which the Company depended for its furs would disappear.
It was the missionary doctor, Marcus Whitman, who more than anyone else most effectively upset the Hudson’s Bay Company plans by denying the Company’s repeated assertion that wagons could never get through the barrier mountains west of Fort Hall. Wagons could, he said. Happily, the Doctor added to his faith, personal knowledge.{45} In 1840 he had welcomed at Waiilatpu a little party, including Joe Meek. This party had succeeded in bringing across the Blue Mountains two wagons; wagons without their beds, but still wheeled vehicles, the first “land canoes” the wondering Indians had ever seen. Thanks largely to Whitman’s helpful and encouraging presence in the great immigrant train of 1843, its wagons came through, and the Oregon Trail acquired the semblance of a road. But unfortunately for the Spokane country to the north, the wagon wheel immigrants had had enough of hard going when at last the flowering Walla Walla valley lay before them. There some settled down and others made their way to the fertile Willamette valley further west and south in Oregon.
For years the north country went unorganized politically, and its wealth of natural resources remained practically untouched. Streams were largely unnavigable and no roads existed to make up for the lack of water transportation. As for Spokane itself, the well-worn fur-trade route, Walla Walla to Colville, definitely bypassed it. Nothing but Indian trails offered ingress. With the passing of the fur trade, a few of those who had been engaged in it, along with a handful of more than usually adventurous pioneers, had taken a chance by settling on tracts of land within the Empire that looked favorable to agriculture and to the maintenance of small herds. Whether they could keep their acreage they had no way of knowing; for long after the United States-Canadian boundaries had been fixed, the land in the future Empire lay unsurveyed as well as politically unorganized.
In 1853 Washington Territory was finally carved out of Oregon, and General Isaac I. Stevens came across the mountains as Governor. His immediate jobs were to make peace with the Indians, to open an East-West wagon road, to determine a route for a railroad across the Cascade mountains, and of course to assist in the organization of political units.
The story of Spokane Garry has indicated in part the steps taken toward the accomplishment of the first of these objectives. When treaties failed, the Indians were overpowered by force.
The task of road building fell to the lot of Lieutenant (later Captain) John Mullan. It has well been said that his was the case of a little man who did a big job. Observant, hardworking, and persevering in spite of difficulties of terrain and discouraging apathy at the nation’s Capitol, he ran a road approximately six hundred miles long from Walla Walla to Fort Benton on the upper Missouri. Since at the Walla Walla end Captain Mullan’s road connected with the older Oregon immigrant road to Wallula on the Columbia, the new highway linked the basins of two of the nation’s greatest waterways. It took seven years to complete the job, years during which the young engineer stuck to his task figuratively through hell and literally through high water. To Congress the road might be primarily a military necessity demanded by Indian uprisings. But Mullan was a dreamer as well as an army officer and engineer. He could see civilization flooding across the humps and bumps of his road; covered wagons and pack trains bearing the people and the mores of the East to the land beyond the shining mountains. Gazing further into the future, he could see the smoke of locomotives following where the pioneer procession led. While his crew, numbering with shovel, pick, ax, and saw, dug and whacked a twenty-five foot swath through more than a hundred miles of virgin forest, constructed rude bridges, installed ferries, and spanned soft earth with corduroy, Mullan jotted down convenient sites for prospective immigrants and noted means of providing them with supplies. Vestiges of his road can still be found buried in the underbrush at various points in Spokane County,{46} though not in the city itself. Like every other main route, it failed to pass through the site of the future city by the falls. Instead, it crossed the river a number of miles upstream via a ferry maintained by a mixed blood, Antoine Plant, of whom more later.{47}
By modern standards Captain John Mullan’s road was no highway. Indeed, it took imagination even to speak of some of its stretches as a road. Twice spring freshets wiped out considerable portions so thoroughly that they had to be entirely rebuilt. Father Cataldo, famed Catholic missioner, reported what was probably the then current jibe: “Don’t you know the Captain made just enough of a trail so he could get back out of here?”
To organize Washington Territory required its subdivision into workable county units, and that is a tale that extends far beyond Governor Stevens’s incumbency. It is a tale of political blundering, ignorance, and ineptitude mixed with comedy and tragedy. Boundary lines were fixed by legislative fiat with reckless abandon and shifted as casually as winds shifted the sand dunes on the Columbia.
Spokane County was a case in point. The bill of 1857-58 authorizing its creation outlined the boundaries with truly western open-handedness. The county embraced “a stretch of plain and mountain, of prairie and forest, of placid lakes and foaming torrents” some two hundred miles wide and nearly four hundred miles long, a total of more than seventy-five thousand square miles, “with scarcely one white person to each thousand,”{48} most of them settled in the Colville valley and practically none along the Spokane!
Three times this county of magnificent distances was recreated by legislative enactment, twice because the officers appointed to organize it had failed to act. They could see nothing to be gained in so doing, either for themselves or for the infinitesimal and widely scattered population. No tax funds were available for expenses, nor were they likely to become available in the immediate future. There were other difficulties. Residents of the county living in the Bitterroot valley in what is now Montana, were asking for a county of their own—without result, save to indicate the difficulties inherent in trying to consolidate the political administration of an area so vast and ill-defined.
No wonder the new county almost died aborning! In fact, it lay in a kind of governmental coma until 1860 when the legislature again acted and the appointed commissioners actually met, organized, arranged for an election, named the little trading post of Pinkney City near Colville as county seat, and otherwise set Spokane County up in business. Sale of a liquor license provided the treasury with its first cash, and succeeding transactions of a similar nature helped materially, though adequate financing remained a difficult problem and measures to replenish the treasury were not always above criticism. In 1863 the county commissioners had the happy thought of approaching the legislature for a law to tax Chinamen $1.50 per month, this sum to be collected by the sheriff at a twenty percent commission. Chinese, complained disgruntled gold seekers, were becoming far too numerous and too prosperous as placer miners along the Columbia. In fact, the Orientals were largely engaged in reworking claims abandoned by some of these same grumblers. But the legislature was sufficiently impressed to pass the necessary legislation, even raising the sheriff’s share to twenty-five percent and allotting half the take to the territorial government.
Although the new county was as poor as it was huge, it had no intention of being overlooked. Obviously, it must have a representative in the territorial Assembly, and H. W. Watson was elected as such. After traversing the long miles horseback to the territorial capitol at Olympia on the far side of the Cascades, the would-be Assemblyman discovered he had no official status, since the act establishing Spokane County had made no provision for such a representative. Happily, the matter was soon adjusted. An accommodating legislature appointed Mr. Watson as Doorkeeper, and with this consolation prize he was able to stay on, though perhaps to his eventual personal undoing. History does not state whether it was his salary as Doorkeeper that enabled him to buy a gold watch with which he started home. But on the way he was murdered by an Indian who coveted the watch. The event led to speedy examination of the murderer in the little courtroom of a Pinkney City justice-of-the-peace and he was hanged forthwith by infuriated citizens and soldiers, without recourse to further judicial procedure.
As though Spokane County were not large enough already, it was in 1864 merged with a huge county to the north and west called Stevens, in honor of the ex-governor who by this time had lost his life in the Civil War. The name Spokane was abandoned in the process of amalgamation. Fort Colville, the chief population center, became the county seat. After seven years, the government was temporarily and officially removed to the tiny settlement at Spokane Falls until the voters should decide where they wanted it permanently. But the officials at Fort Colville refused to remove the records to Spokane, and to Colville the county seat speedily returned.
Gradually Spokane County was shorn of a number of Idaho counties, including Shoshone in which lay the Coeur d’Alene gold fields. Not until 1879 did it emerge as a separate unit including all of what are now Douglas and Lincoln counties. “Shucks!” dryly reminisced a pioneer. “I didn’t need to move around at all in order to live in Washington Territory, the state of Washington, Spokane, Stevens and Lincoln counties. I just stayed put and they came to me.”
During the long years of these geographical and political adjustments, population grew at a snail’s pace. Meantime the bunchgrass flourished “green in the spring, dry in midsummer, and reviving in autumn,” disturbed by the plow only here and there, though increasingly frequented by flocks and herds.
The reason for the relatively speedy development of stock-raising as compared with farming is not far to seek. Livestock was mobile; it could take itself to market. In 1875 “Uncle” Dan Drumheller drove 5,800 head of cattle over the mountains to the Laramie, Wyoming, market. Farm produce, on the other hand, could not propel itself. It had to be carried; and up to the building of the obviously inadequate Mullan road, no avenues of transportation were open save certain navigable stretches of the Snake and the rough and tumble of the upper Columbia.
How stock-raising got its start in the headquarters of the fur trade and the farms of the missionaries has been suggested. When the fur companies withdrew, they left behind in the hands of one-time employees and “remittance men” from overseas (some of them younger sons of British nobility) the company flocks and herds—or at least such animals as the men could afford to purchase for breeding purposes. There were horses too, the spotted Indian ponies and others bred as the exigencies of the trade had demanded. In view of these beginnings it is not surprising to find Scotch, British, and French-Canadian names liberally sprinkled throughout the annals of stock-raising in the Inland Empire. One name not easily overlooked is that of Lord Blythe. Monocled, aloof, maintaining a houseful of servants, this biggest cattleman in the Grand Coulee was humorously aware of his lack of popularity. In the British Isles, said he, “I am ‘My Lord’; but in the Coulee I am only ‘that darned old Blythe.’”
Of course, not all the flocks and herds that roved the bunchgrass and sagebrush were British owned or bred. A scattering of immigrants from the States had with infinite effort pushed through the mountains the lean survivors of the domestic herds with which they had started across the plains, and these survivors waxed strong and prolific in the Walla Walla valley and other favored spots. Their progeny were supplemented by purchase from the Hudson’s Bay Company, for enterprising Americans as well as subjects of the British crown saw wealth in flocks and herds nurtured on the succulent grass of the north country.
The first large herds of cattle recorded in the Spokane valley were owned respectively by two subjects of the British crown and two citizens of the United States. In the late fall of 1854, John Moar and John V. Campbell arrived with their stock at Antoine Plant’s place adjoining his ferry, with the intention of wintering there. They may have had some misgivings when they found Francis B. Owens and a man by the name of Gibson, both American citizens, ahead of them with four or five hundred head of cattle and as many horses. But, as years before when Yankee met Britisher at Spokane House, the encounter was friendly in spite of some underlying rivalry. In view of the mixed Indian and French-Canadian background of their host, the affair even took on an international character. Winter was well on the way and shelter imperative. Working together, Yanks and “Canuks” in two weeks put up a log cabin for the late comers, while Antoine provided both parties with supplies from Fort Colville.
The hordes of gold hunters hurrying through the Inland Empire in the sixties saw nothing in the bunchgrass which might line their pocketbooks. However, they were more than glad to fill their Stomachs with beefsteaks that same grass had made juicy and to provide themselves with similarly nourished ponies to carry themselves and their belongings into and over the Blue Mountains to the shining sands of Orofino. The contemporaneous but less spectacular trek of miners into the gold fields around Colville and the Kootenai country created similar demands. The horse and cattle industry boomed in the Big Bend, the Palouse, and about Colville to such an extent that there soon developed a steady movement of cattle back from the coast to the bunchgrass country east of the Cascades. It was a stockman’s heyday.
The heyday did not last. Many of the would-be miners returned sadder and wiser men, not a few of them to try their own luck at stock-raising. Overproduction plus the decline of the mining rush caused a real depression in the seventies. Yet many a stockman carried on in spite of falling prices, lack of markets, and hazards of prairie fire, winter ice, and summer drought. It might be tough going, but he stuck to it, sometimes out of sheer stubbornness or a love of life in the open even when divested of the glamor that attends the cowboy epoch depicted on the screen and kept green in the memory of the Inland Empire through the famous annual Round-Up at Pendleton in eastern Oregon. There the nostalgic memories of the old-timers are dramatized by red-shirted modern daredevils of tooled stock saddle and supple lariat. They “rope and bust,” “hog-tie” or “rustle,” to the whoops of white-bearded old-timers in the bleachers and the admiration of touring tenderfeet who may gather that herding in bygone days was a perpetual circus and the stockman’s life one continuous round of hearty pleasure interrupted only by bands of “rustlers” or an encounter with firearms after a game of poker.
In reality there was a far less glamorous side to life where the deer and the antelope played on the mesas of the Big Bend and Indian ponies still ran wild on the hills of the Palouse. The deer and the antelope were there, and so were the ponies, until civilization drove them away. But raising horses, sheep, and cattle for profit and riding herd through sage and bunchgrass, whether the herd belonged to a stock baron or a struggling pioneer was neither circus nor picnic. Mounted on his piebald pony, the cowboy frequently spent the entire day in the saddle battling wind or sagebrush or both, as he and one other drove a herd of fifteen hundred or more to range or market. When darkness overtook him, he turned in on the ground with his saddle for pillow, glad that no badger hole hidden in the grass had that day thrown his pony. He slept with one ear cocked for a frightened bellow that meant prowlers, four-footed or on horseback. With daylight he was at it again, perhaps searching for members of the flock that were lost, strayed or stolen, facing the possibility of losing his bearings in a sea of waving grass that stretched to the horizon. To prevent the latter, cowboys who rode the Okanogan plateau finally erected a platform and, from a pole set on top of a huge rock, unfurled the stars and stripes, the whole visible for miles. The Indians called it “Dooley’s Fourth of July.” It is not recorded that cowboys of the Big Bend and the Palouse took similar precautions. They relied upon grit and native sense of direction.
In winter, and with no home to call them, cowboys of all these areas more nearly approximated the life of their glamorous prototypes on the screen, gambling away the summer’s earnings or riding twenty miles in coldest weather to dance all night at a neighborly party—anyone living within a day’s ride was a neighbor—or a strictly commercial affair, with the saloonkeeper as host and some local Molly b’ Damn as dancing partner.
Sheep-raising became a growing industry as the years rolled by. In some ways the sheepherder’s lot was harder than the cowboy’s, though his job was less spectacular. Save for the companionship of his dogs, he passed days and weeks of utter loneliness as he trailed his flock. Sheep, besides being foolish creatures easily led astray, all had an exasperating fastidiousness about what they drank. They would die of thirst sooner than touch water impregnated with properties alien to their taste. This might necessitate a “dry drive” at night, and more than two such drives brought sure disaster. Those “barking wolves,” the coyotes, had constantly to be fended off after dark. Other and larger beasts of prey fond of dining on raw lamb or mutton had also to be guarded against.
If stock-raising was hard on the cowboy and herder it might be equally tough, though in a somewhat different way, on the owner. His were no tenderly cared-for domestic animals, sheltered from the weather in sheds and barns, fed with grain and hay in winter, bedded down in straw, and daily turned out to pasture in summer. His cattle, of excellent breed, grew up on the open range or on vast stretches of grazing land available for a dollar or two per acre. Here they foraged for bunchgrass in and out of season, in peril from predatory animals, prowling bands of Indians, poison larkspur, and prairie fires, and, worst enemy of all, the weather. If the season happened to be unusually dry, water totally disappeared from swales and holes in outcropping scab rock, with none available elsewhere. Even more devastating were occasional hard winters, for only here and there was the land cut by a fertile valley or sheltered gulch providing provender and escape from winter storms, while of man-made shelter there was none. Yet the stockman turned his herd into the open, gambling on the chance that no ill freak of the weather would occur in a land where winters were short and the climate presumably mild. It was reasonably mild for the most part, though a good deal of snow might fall. This in itself caused little trouble except when there was a season of alternate freeze and thaw. Then streams and water holes glazed over and the brown grass became a sea of ice the crust of which cattle frantically and unsuccessfully pawed trying to get through to the nourishment beneath. With no “Operation Haylift” to come to the rescue, the stockman sent up a petition to the god of the winds:
O Stockman’s God! O Thou
To whom we always look
And humbly, trusting, bow
In prayer and praise—CHINOOK!
On Thee we more rely
Than all the hay and straw,
Or barley, oats and rye
For Thy propitious thaw.{49}
If the prayer was answered with a freezing gale, cattle died by the hundreds in helpless circles, tails to the wind that was not the balmy Chinook.
Under like conditions, horses also died miserably on the range, though they were more apt to be successful in pawing through to grass. Even when wintered fairly near the ranch house, their chances for survival might be poor through lack of haystacks and stored-up grain. The owner of a small herd might bare inadequate patches of grass through frantic shoveling, and might even feed his favorite pony with the straw filling of a bed tick when he found the pony trying to eat a fiber doormat. But on the whole it was useless. With spring came the noisome duty of burying under the sod mounds of decaying horseflesh left behind by the coyotes and too close to human living quarters to be left for removal by others of nature’s scavengers.
For the little man such losses might be irreparable. He hired out, took to freighting, became a stage driver, or, if love of the soil was strong enough within him, sought out a fertile valley where he might start all over again on free land as a small farmer. With the stock baron it was different. When warm weather came, he galloped about as usual, skirting with offended nose the rotting carcasses that defiled the upspringing greenness. A few cattle were still alive for breeding purposes and he would buy more. Next winter would be different, and the winter after. Stock-raising was a gamble anyway. When wiped out, one took his ill luck philosophically and gambled again.
It was not until the later years of the bunchgrass era and the coming of dirt farmers, traditional enemies of the stockmen finally recognized as friends, that stock-raising began to be a scientific and fairly stable industry, with horses, cattle, and sheep sheltered against the weather and fed as the season demanded from granary or haystack. Marketing, too, became less of a gamble as demand grew more steady and prices less subject to spectacular rise and fall. Reported one wag in 1890, the $40 price of a three-year-old steer was sufficiently constant to make such an animal legal tender for two $20 gold pieces—provided the owner of the gold pieces wanted the steer badly enough!