One thing I’ve learned in the ten years that I’ve lived in this area is that the words Spokane and pride don’t go together enough. Maybe it’s because I came from a place that was so proud that it simply called it self Butte, America, but I’m always amazed and how little people that live here talk up Spokane. That’s about to change.
A few weeks ago SpoCOOL put the call out to local bloggers to come up with reasons to live in Spokane. Since then I’ve been thinking about what I was going to do. The expected thing of me would be to talk about the Spokane River and list all of the fun things you can do on or around the River. Then I started thinking about my old gig at Down To Earth, and how when Paul and I were first getting that going we undertook a HUGE project to come up with the “7 Wonders of Spokane” in response to a very poor project of similarity by a local news station. All the while I’ve been reading a very old book called “Fifteen Thousand Miles By Stage” in which a young couple in the late 19th century tour around the country by stage couch in search for potential rail development – a book that Spokane is prominently featured in.
Then it hit me when I came across a certain paragraph in the book. The reasons I love living in Spokane, is that despite modernization, growth, development, etc, a lot of what homesteaders and explorers in the 19th century said about Spokane can still be said today. Sure – things are much different now, that’s obvious, but take a look at these quotes and tell me that you couldn’t heard these same quotes uttered by someone flying over Spokane for the first time, or taking the gondola over the Falls.
“I was – enchanted—overwhelmed—with the beauty and grandeur of everything I saw. It lay just as nature had made it, with nothing to mar its virgin glory.” - James Glover 1873 upon first seeing the Spokane River.
Things are a bit different now with seven dams and countless signs of industry along the 111-mile Spokane River, but the beauty and grandeur still remain.
The virgin grandeur and beauty of the Spokane country appealed to us as no other place had none in all our travels. The little village of four hundred or five hundred people straggling over the parklike openings among the pines impressed us as one of the most picturesque in America. As we stood on the banks of the beautiful river and saw its wonderful falls with the magnificent valley, its rich bunchgrass carpet then yellow as gold in its autumn garb and recalled the vast grassland empire stretching to the southeast and southwest, the wonderful mines opening up nearby on the east, the ample forests, and the possibilities for power, the majesty of the situation made Pard declare that “Here will be the greatest inland city of the whole Northwest.” - Carrie Adell Strahorn in “Fifteen Thousand Miles By Stage” writing about seeing Spokane in 1879.
