Gonzaga University and the Jesuit Inland Empire

The Society of Jesus had been working in the Pacific Northwest for nearly fifty years before Gonzaga University opened its doors in Spokane in eighteen eighty-seven, two years before Washington became a state. The Jesuits had arrived on the Columbia Plateau in the eighteen forties, when the Belgian missionary Pierre-Jean De Smet traveled to the interior and established relationships with the Salish, Coeur d'Alene, and other plateau peoples. Their presence preceded the settlers, preceded the railroads, preceded the territorial government.

The institution the Jesuits founded in Spokane grew alongside the city itself, which was incorporated in eighteen eighty-one and was already establishing itself as the commercial center of the region the settlers called the Inland Empire. Gonzaga served the Catholic immigrant population that the Northern Pacific Railway had brought to the Spokane area, provided legal and medical training, and developed the archival infrastructure that makes it the primary institutional memory for Spokane's early history.

The Foley Center library at Gonzaga holds primary materials on the Jesuit mission period in the Pacific Northwest, on Spokane's founding families and the city's territorial-era economy, and on the transition from the fur-trade economy that had defined the region since the eighteen tens to the wheat-and-railroad economy that replaced it. It is one of the few places in the region where the settler perspective on the mission period is documented in depth from contemporaneous sources.

The campus's historic buildings, several listed on the National Register of Historic Places, stand as a record of the confidence with which the Jesuits and Spokane's Catholic founding families imagined a permanent institution in a city that had been incorporated only six years before Gonzaga's founding class walked through its doors.