The Spokane People and the Falls

You are standing at what may be the single most consequential place in the entire Inland Northwest. Spokane Falls, the thundering cascade of the Spokane River, is not a backdrop. It is the reason a city exists here at all.

The Spokan people, a Salish-speaking Plateau nation, have lived in this river corridor for thousands of years. Their name for themselves and for this place is the same word. Archaeologists have documented continuous occupation across this landscape from at least seven thousand years before the arrival of Europeans. The Spokan were not a wandering people, nor were they stationary. They followed a seasonal round that took them east into present-day Idaho and Montana, south to the Columbia Plateau, and north toward what is now British Columbia, always anchored to the river between seasons.

What drew all of this movement back to the Falls every summer was salmon. Chinook salmon, some of them weighing sixty to eighty pounds, migrated from the Pacific Ocean up the Columbia River and into the Spokane River in enormous numbers. Tribal records and early settler accounts describe runs of a million fish or more passing through this corridor each year. The Falls created a natural pinch point where fish concentrated, making them easier to harvest from platforms built out over the water. The Spokan shared this bounty with neighboring tribes across the Columbia Plateau.

That world ended within a single human lifetime after Euro-American contact. By nineteen fifteen, the Long Lake Dam on the Spokane River blocked upstream salmon passage. By nineteen thirty-nine, Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River ended the runs entirely. The last salmon that had reached these falls was already gone before most of the city's brick buildings were even finished.