A Combined Harvester, near Walla Walla.
Photo. by W. D. Chapman.
One must necessarily visit Spokane on a journey through the great wheat country. Spokane, the metropolis and the pride of Eastern Washington, is a wonder to the Eastern tourist. Such a city, over one hundred thousand people, with costly brick and stone buildings, four, six, ten stories high, impressive public buildings, schools, churches, hotels, hundred-foot avenues well-paved, private dwellings of architectural excellence,—and hardly a soul there thirty years ago!
A grand spectacle the falls offered the eye in old Spokane, but now, alas, so cribbed and cabined is the noble stream by the march of industrial and electrical power that its wild energy is well-nigh gone except at the highest water. The total fall in the Spokane River is one hundred and forty-six feet, and the horse-power capacity at low water is forty thousand, at high water over half a million.
Many points of interest must be hastily passed. The author feels great reluctance to omit a visit to the State College of Washington at Pullman, and the University of Idaho at Moscow. There are also historic spots, as one at Rosalia where a monument has recently been erected in commemoration of the Steptoe defeat in 1858, and the site of the first church in Eastern Washington on Walker’s Prairie, where Eells and Walker started a mission for the Spokane Indians in 1838. There is also at the junction of the Spokane and Little Spokane, the site of Spokane House, a post of the Hudson’s Bay Company, started in 1811. One might also well desire to visit the location of the old Spokane Bridge, where Colonel Wright crushed forever the pride and power of the Spokanes by killing eight hundred of their choicest horses.
On whatever side viewed, either past or present, or in the forecast of the future, Spokane is worthy of careful study. Its extensive railroad system and its network of electric lines reaching the many lakes, garden and fruit tracts, and rapidly developing suburbs, are concentrating the interests of a vast and wealthy region. But there are other cities to see and other boomers to hear and other bright futures to forecast, and so we turn our faces southward on the line of the O. R. & N. Railway, passing through vale after vale between the swelling prairies, with wheat, wheat, wheat, oats, oats, oats, hay, hay, hay, cattle, horses, hogs, apple trees, and sugar beets, elegant farmhouses on the knolls and spacious barns in the hollows,—the great Palouse farming country, one of the most productive in the world. Whitman County has produced eight million bushels of wheat in a season, besides vast quantities of other products.
A hundred and forty miles from Spokane the great wheat plateau is broken by the profound abyss of Snake River. Dark, turbid, sullen, not so beautiful as the northern branches flowing out of the lakes, this largest of all the tributaries of the River goes on its swift and treacherous course to the union with the Columbia. Snake River is famous for its orchards. Almota, Penewawa, Alpowa, Kelly’s Bar, Clarkston, Asotin, are the most prominent among many points where the cherries, peaches, nectarines, apricots, berries, grapes, go out by the carload and steamerload, earlier than anywhere else except on the banks of the Columbia itself, to all parts of the West and even at times to Chicago and New York. The region of these enormously productive fruit ranches is a narrow ribbon of fertile land at the bottom of a cañon fifteen hundred feet deep. Hot? Yes, hot! They say the mercury sometimes boils out of the top of the thermometer. But heat and water and good soil make the rich juice and bright cheeks of the peach and nectarine. Hundreds of miles up Snake River in the wide expanses of Southern Idaho the waters are being diverted for some of the largest irrigation enterprises on earth. There the Twin Falls canal, one hundred feet wide and deep enough for a steamboat, conveys the water to two hundred and eighty thousand acres of land. The Minidoka canal covers almost as much. That part of the Snake River Valley, three hundred miles long by fifty miles wide, will ere long count its inhabitants by the million.
Inland Empire System’s Power Plant, near Spokane, 20,000 Horse-Power.
Photo. by T. W. Tolman.
