SPOKANE FALLS had lusty rivals in its earlier years. The lustiest was Cheney, a score of miles away to the southwest. Up to the middle seventies, the place had been but a convenient trading point known as Depot Springs. Then Frederick Billings, busy with one of the perennial reorganizations of the Northern Pacific, laid out a town site, there and Depot Springs graciously changed its name to Billings. Further manipulations in railroad financing and organization followed. Boston capitalist Benjamin P. Cheney came upon the scene as a director of the Northern Pacific and gave the community ten thousand dollars to establish the Benjamin P. Cheney Academy on an eight-acre site presented by the railroad. What more natural than that the town of Billings should now become Cheney and begin angling for designation as county seat of Spokane County?
Unfortunately for Cheney’s ambition, the honor was bestowed upon Spokane Falls when the boundaries of the frequently made-over county were redrawn by legislative enactment in 1879. Apparently Jim Glover had had a finger in that pie, just as in almost everything else of importance to the community. In any case, he had spent a good deal of time in Olympia during the critical session, and there he was frequently observed at Doane’s oyster house reasoning with members of the legislature over pan roasts, liquid refreshments, and cigars. It took considerable reasoning, for the majority of the territorial lawmakers were either abysmally ignorant concerning developments in the interior or frankly not interested. Whatever else may have helped to bring about the desirable result, Jim Glover came home broke, but won the county seat.
A string had been attached to the arrangement, however. The voters of Spokane County were given permission to transfer the seat of government elsewhere at the next election if they so desired. A heated campaign preceded the November, 1880, election. According to a first count, upstart Cheney won by fourteen votes, though Spokane Falls candidates were elected to important offices, including those of treasurer and auditor.
Canvass of the returns (in Spokane Falls, of course) revealed “grave irregularities.”{76} In one precinct the judge of elections had sworn himself in, as the only person on hand for the job. Polling officers had in one case “used longhand where they could have used figures,” and in another they had reversed the operation. After duly pondering these irregularities, the canvassing board announced that, actually, Spokane Falls had, by a margin of two or three votes, won the county seat. It need scarcely be added that the decision was properly celebrated.
The next move was obviously Cheney’s. Promptly it filled the air with anguished cries that fourteen votes had been thrown out unlawfully. Citizens of Spokane Falls returned the outcry with interest. At the instigation of Benjamin P. Cheney, they shouted, contractors for the railroad had quartered one hundred and fifty laborers in the neighborhood of Cheney long enough to give them the right to vote at the general election, and seventy-five were known to have thus qualified. At this point outraged Cheney sought court action, and in the presence of a heavily armed audience the court ordered a recount—at an unspecified date. Meantime Spokane Falls was left with its courthouse, the county records, the county auditor, W. H. Bishop, and the treasurer, A.M. Cannon.
On a night in March, nearly five months after the election, Spokane Falls turned out almost to the last man and woman to attend a wedding dance. Stealthily down the pineclad hills south of the river dropped an armed band which included the probate judge, a justice of the peace, and a deputy sheriff. Tying their horses across the gully from the frame building on Main and Howard bearing the impressive sign “Courthouse,” the group stole over and entered through a door left unlocked by County Auditor Bishop. Deaf to the call of the near-by fiddles, he had remained late in his office to tie up books and records in convenient bundles and to lay out ready for audit a complete tabulation of election returns. By law he could name a recanvassing board. Where could he find better personnel for it—a judge, a justice of the peace, a deputy sheriff. He lost no time in appointing them.
With lights turned low, and at top speed, the board carried out its legal duties and signed the required certificates, indicating that according to its recanvass Cheney was the duly constituted county seat. To make assurance doubly sure, the auditor’s visitors shouldered all the county records and decamped, taking the auditor along, apparently without resistance on his part. As a responsible public official, was it not his duty to accompany the county documents to see that they came to no harm?
A chorus of barking dogs did their best to sound the alarm, but the town marshal only fired an admonitory shot in the direction of the hubbub and let it go at that. Might be some four-legged prowler there; a shot would scare him off.
Great was the consternation in Spokane Falls the next morning. It had lost the county seat, and along with it, the county auditor! Perhaps, like the records, he had been abducted. Street corners rang with loud and angry talk. But the records were in Cheney, in accordance with a count which had at least some semblance of legality, and a scout sent to investigate returned with the word that they were under the protection of an armed guard.
The village by the falls swallowed its disappointment as best it could, and one by one the county officials moved to Cheney, since commuting the forty miles there and back by saddle horse was out of the question. The armed guard was maintained around the county books for six weeks. Treasurer Cannon held out for those six weeks, but in the end even he gave up and deputized a resident of Cheney to serve for him.
The blow to Spokane Falls pride and prestige was heavy, and to its pocketbook not inconsiderable. Sales of real estate lagged, merchants worried about their investments. Sprague, Ritzville, Colfax, Cheney—all the little towns round about—were forging ahead while Spokane Falls with all its potential resources seemed to be marking time.
From every point of view the outlook was dreary. Even the usually hopeful promoters around the California House stove admitted it. As though it were not enough for Cheney to have captured the county seat, rumor had it that at least for some time it would be the terminus of the Northern Pacific line presently wriggling eastward from Ainsworth near the confluence of the Columbia and the Snake to meet—somewhere and sometime—the line of the same company so long crawling westward across the plains and still a thousand miles away. Not even Father Cataldo’s comforting assurance, reinforced by the purchase of his rock pile, that the Northern Pacific must come to the Falls served to dissipate the gloom to any appreciable extent. Some said that the good Father was acquainted with important railway officials and his influence might be considerable. But who could tell? Since its very inception back in the sixties, the Northern Pacific project for a transcontinental railroad crossing the barrier Cascades north of the Columbia River had been an off-again, on-again proposition. It had been interrupted by bankruptcies, and by frequent changes in officers, policy, and projected routes. It had been bedeviled by the machinations of rival roads. At the moment such rivalry was spearheaded by Henry Villard and his Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company, intent on preventing any line either local or transcontinental from going through the Cascade Mountains to Tacoma or Seattle, and equally set on maintaining the Columbia River route to Portland as the only practicable outlet for the interior. True enough, the Northern Pacific was actually approaching Cheney—was indeed nearly there. Jim Glover and others were contractors for the line. But the question remained—when, if ever, would the railroad reach Spokane Falls?
At long last the Northern Pacific actually did. It was at four o’clock on the afternoon of Saturday, June 25, 1881, that the rails were laid to Howard Street, still only a dirt road, although it was the town’s main north and south thoroughfare. “Hundreds of citizens,” reported the Spokan Times, “came to witness the last strokes uniting our fair city to the marts of commerce.” Laying the last rails was, however, a relatively unimportant event compared with the arrival of the first train a few hours later. It was loaded with excursionists enjoying a free ride from Cheney in six boxcars. As the engine puffed to a stop, Spokane Falls’ brass band erupted in a triumphant tune, hats sailed into the air, and a burst of giant powder touched off in the rocks substituted for fireworks.
Why shouldn’t Spokane Falls celebrate? This was what every man-jack of the pushing, shouting crowd of four hundred had been waiting for since his arrival. It didn’t even matter that Cheney had been the first to hear a locomotive whistle. “Speech!” the crowd yelled, “Speech!” as eager eyes searched for railway superintendent Fairweather. He was not to be found. Dusty, grinning, and unrecognized he had slipped in earlier on a switch engine. So Jim Glover took over. Mounting a car, he waved aloft his red bandana. “Hip! Hip! Hip!” Three times the assembled citizens made the welkin ring with their hurrahs for the Northern Pacific railroad. Then Jim Glover climbed down and the crowd dispersed in twos, threes, or larger groups to continue the celebration as thirst, pocketbook, or grateful thanks for a dream fulfilled directed.
Thereafter, the daily whistle of a locomotive was heady wine. A.M. Cannon removed his stock of goods, together with the bank he had started on a shoestring in the former Glover building, to a fine wooden structure on Riverside and Mill, thus establishing a new business center. Soon the First National Bank was inaugurated with some six thousand dollars that Glover had contrived to lay away in his tin box, plus modest sums furnished by the other directors. The Echo Roller Mills, a daring venture, superseded the earlier mill of Frederic Post. Responding to an urgent invitation, a piano tuner came up from Walla Walla to tune ten pianos at ten dollars each. A good brickyard was started. Bill Gray substituted a real chimney for the flimsy affair of painted tin at the California House. The Wolverton Block went up. This was the first all-brick business structure, and when others like it replaced the unpainted shacks with false fronts that deceived nobody, the business district took on an air of solid permanence.
A second newspaper, the Democratic Spokane Chronicle, made its debut. Then came a third, Republican in its leanings. It was first known as the Spokane Falls Review. Eventually, by virtue of a combination, it emerged as the Spokesman-Review, still the leading newspaper of the Inland Empire. The first editor of the earlier sheet was Frank Dallam. He loved Spokane Falls from the moment of arrival, but he could be critical too. The general lack of paint was one of the things that annoyed him. Other things were more than annoyances. If they bore the earmarks of public scandals, Dallam, being an editor of the old school, charged into them, no matter whose toes were stepped on.{77} Once they were the toes of a leading citizen—in fact, a very prominent citizen. He was making unauthorized use of public property, quoth the editor. In truth, he had actually appropriated it.
When the subject of Dallam’s biting editorial glimpsed it, he seized his pistol and hurried to the editor’s quarters, followed by a sympathetic clerk, also armed. Bursting in on Dallam and his wife in the room that did duty as office and pressroom, he flourished his pistol and thundered, “Retract!”
If Dallam had a pistol, it was not at hand. So he picked up the likeliest weapon in sight, his metal side-stick. A lusty blow sent his visitor’s pistol flying and lamed his hand. Another, and the young clerk was disarmed. In the free-for-all that followed, blood and type were distributed about equally over the premises. In the end, however, the editor sent his visitors packing, or rather, tumbling down the stairs, and was pleased to report in his next issue that though they would probably prefer to live in retirement for some weeks he himself had emerged tired but uninjured.
Among the public improvements noted in the newspapers as incidental to the arrival of the railroad was better water service. Instead of tanks and barrels of river water, spring water had become available through daily deliveries from a Northern Pacific tank. But this was not enough; agreement was general that a system of waterworks should be installed. But how?
Two local financiers thought they had the answer and sought a franchise authorizing the installation and maintenance of a Holly system which they proposed to put in with borrowed funds. The only snag was that Spokane Falls had never been incorporated and so could not grant a franchise. Obviously the situation had to be remedied with all speed. Leading citizens went to work to such good purpose that late in 1881 Spokane Falls emerged as a city duly incorporated and vested with the powers necessary to issue the franchise.
It would be pleasant to record that the waterworks system was secured with equal speed. But before the plant could be installed, the funds of a good many local capitalists, including those of the promoters, had disappeared in the failure of Villard’s great “blind pool” that bound together in a holding company the fortunes of the Northern Pacific and competing roads.
Villard had been welcomed with flags and bunting and royally entertained on a visit to the Falls, but in spite of all the brave speechmaking and newspaper publicity, nothing had come of the affair save rosy hopes, and now even these were dashed. Locomotives continued to whistle, but Cheney got most of the trade. The coming of the railroad had been a temporary stimulant, but something more was needed to give Spokane Falls a lasting boost. That something was just around the corner, but the town did not know it.