Selling the Pend Oreille Valley as an Agricultural Eden

Agriculture in the Pend Oreille Valley is largely in the transition stage. The early settlers made their homes mostly in or near the natural clearings, and lacking transportation facilities for other products, were content to raise cattle that could be driven out on the hoof to market. With the coming of the railroad and steamboat trade on the river, dairying was taken up and a ready market was found in Spokane for all the cream that could be produced.

Then more settlers came in, and the natural clearings being taken up, the newcomers were obliged to content themselves with land that the early settlers considered worthless for farming purposes. This land was on the benches above the river, and was of a yellow sandy loam nature. This bench land being covered with timber, somewhat slow progress has been made in clearing and adapting it to tillage, but wherever a settler has persisted for a few years in clearing and tilling, his reward has been in every instance commensurate with his efforts. Natural clearings, where the land has been worn out by continual pasturage and cropping in wild hay, have been plowed and tilled for the past three years, yielding bumper crops of wheat, oats, barley and grain hay. Cleared land on the benches, where tillage has been thorough, yield 500 to 1,000 bushels of potatoes per acre or two to four tons of hay, while all kinds of garden vegetables and small fruits grow to a size and quality inimitable.

All lands in Pend Oreille are inexhaustibly fertile in two of the three elements that are needed to grow any kind of vegetables; that is, all soils are rich in potash and phosphoric acid. Nitrogen has to be supplied in some form to insure most crops, but as is usually the case, nature has set about supplying the deficiency, for at the least stirring of the soil white clover springs up, and at once begins to store nitrogen from the air in the nodules at the roots. So that when the white clover sod is plowed under the ground is fit for any crop.

Some of the coarser gravel soils are especially adapted for fruit trees, particularly the apple, pear and plum. No irrigation is necessary for any of the foregoing. But some special garden crops are benefited by being planted where irrigation is possible. Such places exist along the river bottom at the mouths of creeks, and where taken advantage of surprising crops of garden truck have resulted.

The farmer in the Pend Oreille valley suffers very few handicaps from insect and fungoid pests, and the lumber mills and mines will insure him a market at good prices for all his surplus crops for many years to come, while in the more distant future Alaska and the Orient will furnish a constant demand for his crops at prices that will stimulate his industry, and make the Pend Oreille valley farmer the envy of farmers of less favored regions.

J. T. Patterson.