PUBLISHER'S NOTE: Twenty years ago, on June 5, 2003, we took a deep dive into the Spokane River — past, present and future. That was a decade before Riverfront Park renovation discussions even started. In "The River," we featured stories by Jack Nisbet, Paul Quinnett and John Osborn; poetry by Tom Davis; art by Ken Perkins; and photography by Amy Sinisterra. As we celebrate our 30 years of publishing, we'll be reprinting a selection of stories from our past; below we have adapted one from that package, by Bill Youngs, author of The Fair and the Falls. Next year, Spokane celebrates the 50th anniversary of the world's fair Youngs documented in his book.
We found the river, then we lost it, and now we are trying to recover it. That, in a sentence, is the history of human contact with Spokane Falls. Not many years ago, the river thundered through one of America's great wilderness settings. Abundant forests grew near its banks. Approaching on foot, Indians and early white trappers heard the sound of the falls long before they saw them.
Every year, thousands of salmon swam from the Pacific Ocean, up the Columbia River, and up the Spokane until they came to the falls. Using spears and nets, native fishers caught hundreds of salmon daily, week after week. Standing at the base of the falls, amid the water and the fish, they were touched, even baptized by the river.
The Spokane Indians were so closely associated with the salmon that they imitated fish to indicate their tribal identity. As one early observer noted, by way of introduction the Indian hand "moved in a manner to suggest the movement of the tail of a salmon." The tribal name also suggests the intimate relationship between the Indians and the falls. Linguist Grant Smith argues that the best translation of Spokane is "Children of the Refracted Light" — from the Indian experience of standing in the river where the sun shone down through the spray of the falls.
When a white man came to Spokane with the intention of buying the land beside the falls as a town site, he too was baptized in the river. James Glover rode into Spokane on May 11, 1873, and bedded down for the night in a roofless squatter's cabin. Next morning, he rolled out of his blanket and walked to "a great rock" overlooking the falls. He later recalled: "I gave myself completely over to admiration and wonder at the beautiful, clear stream that was pouring into the kettle and over the falls." Glover was soaked by the spray, but didn't mind: "I sat there, unconscious of anything but the river, gazing and wondering and admiring."
If John Muir had ridden into Spokane in May 1873, the outcome might have been different. Muir was already encouraging Americans to preserve the natural wonders of the American wilderness, places like Yosemite, places that inspired "gazing and wondering and admiring." And Spokane Falls was one of those enchanted places.
Far-fetched?
Not at all.
Just consider what Carrie Adell Strahorn had to say on the subject. The wife of a Union Pacific employee, Strahorn traveled throughout the West and publicized her experience in a book called Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage. In 1880, she and her husband arrived in Spokane. A few days earlier, they had been visiting Yellowstone, America's first national park. With one of the world's great natural wonders fresh in their experience, they might have thought little of Spokane Falls.
Instead, they were overwhelmed.
Carrie Strahorn wrote, "The virgin grandeur and beauty of the Spokane country appealed to us as no other place had done in all our travels. The little village ... impressed us as one of the most picturesque in America."
James Glover had established by 1880 a store and a mill. The first settlers stayed close to the river in imagination and in reality. They named their town Spokane Falls, acknowledging the source of their identity and wealth. In homes and hotels in the village, you could hear the roar of the falls. For the first decade of its existence, the town of Spokane Falls attracted tourists from western Washington and Oregon to its sports fishery — "one of the finest on the coast" the Spokan Times declared.
But already Spokane was conquering its river — and in the process losing it. One mill was well and good, but why not two or four or more? Why not build them bigger and bigger?
Year by year, businessmen took control of the falls, rearranging the river to suit their needs. The riverbed was recontoured with dynamite and fill — here a picturesque rock was removed and there a channel was covered. Sawdust from the mills choked the life out of the trout, and sewage made the water — once used for drinking — unsafe even for swimming.
Electricity arrived, making the water power all the more valuable, and the utilitarian conquest of the river became all the more inevitable. Railroad bridges and highway bridges soon girdled the falls; parking lots, motels and railroad depots crowded the river banks. A huge iron trestle separated downtown Spokane from the river, and from its location on present-day Canada Island, an industrial laundry spewed dirty suds into the water.
More regretfully, the pioneers dropped a name that actually does belong to the town. The falls nurtured the city, but the city spurned the falls: In 1891, Spokane Falls became merely Spokane.
Incredible as it may seem today, there was even talk during the 1950s of paving the southern channel of the river to provide more parking.
Fortunately, during the 1960s many Spokanites began to rediscover the falls and regretted that they were so hard to see and appreciate. In a series of events so complex and intriguing that describing them led this author to write the longest book on any American world's fair since World War II, these citizens worked together to create Expo '74 — the environmental world's fair. Railroad bridges came down, along with depots, parking lots and the industrial laundry. They were replaced with exposition pavilions that, for the most part, were then replaced with a park.
King Cole was the president of Spokane's exposition, but more than that he was the "heart" of the fair. Years later, he noted that previously the falls had been in a "very unattractive" part of town. "We got rid of that," he said, "and we supplanted it with something that was almost a fairy land in quality: a beautiful landscaped area, riverbanks, river full of fish, foot bridges everywhere and lighting. So the whole thing was flipped over almost instantaneously.'
This was the triumph of Expo '74, but it was an incomplete triumph, and a few years later the process of forgetting the falls was on the verge of a tragic new phase.
Incredibly, there was the possibility for a time that a new bridge would be built over the falls. Now, almost 30 years after the world's fair, the rediscovery of the falls is at best a job half done.
Architect Rick Hastings would like to see this change. One of the founders of "Friends of the Falls," an organization dedicated to finishing the environmental job that Expo began, Hastings notes that while Spokane has a river environment unsurpassed by any other American city, other cities (such as San Antonio) surpass Spokane in connecting the community to the river.
The Friends of the Falls advocates a Gorge Park extending down the river from the upper falls — an idea first proposed by the Olmsted brothers in 1908.
Such activities indicate a growth in a sense of what Hastings calls "loyalty and protectiveness" toward the falls. We may yet be able to "gaze and wonder" at the river, almost as James Glover did long ago.
When that day comes, Spokane will again be Spokane Falls. ♦