Between 18,000 and 13,000 years ago, glaciers advanced and retreated over northern Washington. This ice formed a fragile dam on the Clark Fork River, which slowly filled with water, creating glacial Lake Missoula. The lake spanned hundreds of miles…

In 1940, Congress mandated that the Bureau of Reclamation would be granted all the land that would be flooded by Lake Roosevelt, from the banks of the Columbia up to 1310 feet of elevation. But passing the bill was only the beginning. The…

The landscape that lies under Lake Roosevelt today is part of a series of “benchlands,” flat regions separated by steep drops. The soil is fertile, and the nearby Columbia River provided drainage, but without a way to bring more water uphill to…

Starting in 1902, the Indian children at the Fort Spokane boarding school tended this orchard. As part of “civilizing” the natives, the school taught native children to farm. The children, some as young as six years old, had to grow potatoes, wash…

White Americans of the early 1900s were often obsessed with concepts of race and whiteness. But what did they mean by "white?" In 1912 a recent immigrant from India to Spokane would put the idea to the test.Born in Calcutta in 1880, A. K. Mozumdar…

If you’ve never seen a city taken over by almost sixty thousand runners, visit downtown Spokane on the first Sunday in May. Since 1977, the Lilac Bloomsday Run has been a major event for the city. Throngs of runners take on the 12-kilometer course,…

This block, spanning Chestnut from College to Broadway, is where Jacob Goetz's lifelong friend and business partner Harry F. Baer built his home in 1888. We know the two friends spent plenty of time at this location in the 1910s and 20s.…

Was Spokane too much of a backwater for punk rock? Not if musicians like Jan Gregor or Brad Muller had anything to say about it. Spokane’s relative isolation in the early 80s made the “do it yourself” spirit of punk a necessity--local bar owners had…