The Boomtown Blueprint: Spokane's Rapid Rise
A vivid 1889 account of how an empty wilderness became a bustling metropolis, and the speculative fever that drove early Seattle-era pioneers to transform Washington's landscape.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
When Mr. Have was inaugurated, Spokane was a blank wilderness. Not a single civilized person lived within a hundred miles of it. One day in 1878, a white man came along in a 'bull team,' saw the wild rapids and the mighty falls of the Spokane river, looked at the tide of immigration just turning toward the further Northwest, and concluded he would sit right down where he was and wait for a city to grow around him. This far-sighted pioneer is still living within ear-shot of these rumbling falls. The greater part of this has grown within his own notice since 1883, when the Northern Pacific Railroad reached Spokane. The merchants were wisely provided with streets, and rental values were kept low, even as an inducement that settlers might attend to business. The waters of the Spokane river, clear and continuous, were diverted to the mills and the city that had been established above them. The people of Spokane own a larger part of the taxable property in the city than is the case with the residents of any other town in the Northwest, except Helena. They are by no means unmindful of the advantages afforded them by foreign capital, but they have not waited for it. They have gone right ahead and done for themselves.
“Somebody is always talking about the time when he was offered a third of Denver or a half of St. Paul for the price of a buffalo robe.”
This account from 1889 highlights the cyclical nature of Pacific Northwest 'boomtown' anxiety—where settlers were obsessed with becoming the next great commercial hub. Much like modern Seattle's rapid tech-driven growth, Spokane’s origin story was built on aggressive land speculation and a desperate struggle to capture the infrastructure (railroads) that would ensure long-term dominance.
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