The Railroad That Built a City

Before June twenty-fifth, eighteen eighty-one, Spokane Falls was a settlement of fewer than a few hundred people huddled near a sawmill and a trading post. After that date, the arithmetic of distance and commerce in the entire Pacific Northwest rearranged itself.

The Northern Pacific Railroad arrived that day, pulling six boxcars of passengers in from Cheney to the west. It was not a glamorous arrival. There was no golden spike, no presidential ceremony. The spike moment for the Northern Pacific came two years later at Gold Creek, Montana, in September of eighteen eighty-three, when the full transcontinental route from Lake Superior to Puget Sound was finally complete. But the practical transformation of Spokane Falls had already begun. The railroad moved grain from the Palouse, timber from the forests, and ore from the mountain mines to coastal ports and then to global markets. It moved settlers in the opposite direction by the thousands.

Within a decade, Spokane Falls had grown from a frontier outpost into a city of twenty thousand people. It was reincorporated simply as Spokane in eighteen ninety-one, dropping the Falls from its name as if to announce that it had grown beyond any single feature of its landscape. By nineteen ten, the population had reached one hundred four thousand. Spokane had eclipsed every other city in the Inland Northwest and styled itself the capital of the Inland Empire, a self-declared economic sphere stretching across eastern Washington, northern Idaho, western Montana, and parts of Oregon.

That ambition was real and not entirely rhetorical. Five major railroads would eventually converge on Spokane, making it one of the most intensively connected rail cities in the West. The city became the banking, supply, and financial headquarters for mines, farms, and timber operations across a vast hinterland. All of that, from the grain silos to the mining exchanges, grew from a single wooden depot and six boxcars pulling in on a summer morning in eighteen eighty-one.