These gently sloping hills beside the lake show the marks of a tumultuous process at work. This region of the Columbia Basin was carved over eons by the meander of the river, by slow erosion, and by explosive ice-age floods.

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 over present-day Montana. Periodically, the dam burst open, sending the entire lake hurtling down the western slope of the continent. It is estimated that these floods carried as much as fifty cubic miles of dirt and rock with them. Over time, the ice dams reformed, creating a millennia-long flood cycle that might have taken place 60 or even 100 times.

These hills are typical of landscapes created by the slow movement of glaciers. Rippling features in Montana prairies, the “channeled scablands," and the mounds of loess in the Washington Palouse also suggest the flow of water. As far back as the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists have theorized on what could have caused these features. In 1923, the geologist J Harlen Bretz published the first paper on the theory that massive floods created these features. More modern techniques have provided even stronger evidence, matching local rock and soil to materials spread across the West and the shore of the Pacific. The broad strokes of this geologic history are widely agreed on today, but the floods still presents mysteries to scientists.

The most important legacy of these ice age floods is the ground beneath our feet. These floods moved soil nutrients and broke through thick layers of volcanic rock, priming the area for farming. By gouging canyons across the state, they even influenced the course of the Columbia basin, setting the stage for the human history that would follow. When we stand on the banks of the Columbia today, we are standing in the history of the local Native American cultures and of later settlers. But we are also standing in the long history of Earth itself.

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How do you get two tribes, six counties, and nine federal agencies to agree on something? As work began on the Grand Coulee Dam, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation was busy acquiring the land that would lie within the reservoir’s 500 miles of coastline.

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 wording of the original law was so vague that both the Colville and Spokane nations, which owned land next to the river, refused to accept it. Promising “approximately one-quarter” of the lake for the tribes’ “paramount use,” the law would have left the tribes with little to show for the loss of thousands of acres of farmland and fishing grounds. Representatives from the tribes traveled to Washington, D.C. to protest the law in person. The dispute was not resolved until a 1990 agreement that set environmental protections, gave the tribes control over 40,000 acres of land, and secured tribal authority over boating and fishing on the Columbia and Spokane rivers.

On the east side of the proposed lake, the city of Kettle Falls found itself split in two by the 1310-foot elevation line. (The city we call Kettle Falls today was then called Meyers Falls.) Ironically, the city was above the level of the lake, about 1290 feet elevation. But the law was inflexible, so Kettle Falls had to be abandoned. The foundations along the town’s main street are still visible today.

Making room for the new lake was an administrative puzzle, and the “1310 line” was one piece of the solution. It set a blueprint for Lake Roosevelt and the surrounding cities. But it also had far-reaching consequences for the rights of the local tribes.

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If they’d known it would end up under a lake, they might not have worked so hard to bring water to this land.

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 farms, crop yields were limited. The solution was an irrigation system.

Construction began in 1908 after the Fruitland Irrigation Company settled a lawsuit with the local water and power company. Fruitland company president L. MacLean called it “one of the largest irrigation schemes that has ever been attempted” in the northwest. The irrigation channel ran from the confluence of the Colville and Columbia rivers, near Kettle Falls, to the town of Daisy, 15 miles South on the Columbia. This created a long triangle of irrigated land on the edge of the river, ideal for the orchards that still grow there today.

As settlers came to the Northwest in the end of the nineteenth century, they brought agriculture with them. In order to claim homesteads, these farmers had to build some form of “improvements” to their land, and small irrigation projects were common. But a countywide project like the Fruitland system meant that the area’s farms had a lasting stake in the economy.

Carrying water across eastern Washington took ingenuity. The finished “irrigation ditch” was actually a combination of ditches, crossings, and wooden flumes that carried water above ground. Most of the irrigation system was removed in the 1930s or abandoned to the rising waters, but pieces of it can still be seen today--reminding us that even on the edge of the Columbia, water is a critical resource.

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Today, most of Fort Spokane is bare foundations. But in the shade of the ponderosas on the western edge of the site, a few of the orchard’s original apple trees have held their ground for more than a century. These ancient trees have a story to tell.

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 laundry, and do all the chores of keeping up the grounds. Living at the school also introduced them to a western diet, like the fruit from the orchard. In his 1902 report, school superintendent Frank Avery called the school “ideally located for fruit culture,” and proudly reported that the orchard had been planted with 620 fruit trees, almost all of which were “living and in fine condition.”

After the boarding school closed in 1909, it became a tuberculosis hospital for American Indians from the local reservations. The trees continued to bear fruit. Fresh air was thought to slow the progress of tuberculosis, so some Indian boarding schools set up tents in their orchards to house students with the disease. Patients at Fort Spokane may have camped among these trees in the summer season.

Today, only a handful of fruit trees remain. We can only guess what the orchard represented to the children who lived and worked at the boarding school, or to the patients who were treated at the hospital. But, like the local tribes, the trees remaining today have outlived the long years of the boarding school and the hospital. Their roots have held, and whatever the region’s future holds, they will be part of it.

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The crowds who came to see Akhay Kumar Mozumdar at this church in 1916 considered him a holy man, possibly even a miracle worker. But was he white? Few today know the story of Mozumdar, or how this Spokane resident became a national test case for the idea of whiteness, one hundred years ago.

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 was trained in Hindu spirituality from an early age. In 1905 he arrived in Seattle, and found a receptive audience for his teachings, which combined Christianity with Hindu meditative practice. He lectured all over the country, but in Spokane, where he lived and wrote for many years, he was best known for this downtown Christian Yoga Church on 3rd Avenue.

But through it all, Mozumdar dreamed of becoming an American citizen. The law at the time offered citizenship only to “free born whites,” but offered no clear-cut legal definition of the term. So in 1912, Mozumdar applied for naturalization, ready to challenge the meaning of "whiteness".

Arguing before judge Frank H. Rudkin in a Spokane courthouse, Mozumdar testified about his ancestry: As a member of the ruling caste in India, he argued, he was of unmixed Aryan blood, and should be considered white under the law. There was no legal precedent for or against him, so as one newspaper account put it, the court had leeway to consider his ancestry “neither white nor black, but shading toward the former.” Judge Rudkin deliberated on the matter for months, but finally issued a judgement in May of 1913. Mozumdar, officially “white” in the eyes of the law, became the first Hindu to become a U.S. citizen. While the precedent did not help Hindus of lower castes or Sikhs, who made up most of the Indians then living in the U.S., it did create a path to citizenship for a number of other Hindus.

While in Spokane, Mozumdar wrote his most influential book, The Life and the Way. His Sunday services were popular throughout his time in Spokane, and encouraged a number of other alternative spiritual groups around the country. He also gave lectures about life in India. In 1919 he moved to California, where he continued to grow his church at a new campus in the San Bernardino Mountains. He even traveled to Hollywood to produce a film, "Beyond the Veil," in 1924.

When he died in 1953, Mozumdar had spent almost half of his life in the U.S. A 1923 Supreme Court ruling overturned his victory, ruling that Hindus were not “free born whites” after all and stripping him of his citizenship. A 1946 law allowed him to apply again. But these reversals of fortune would not diminish his legacy. Today, Mozumdar is remembered best as a spiritual leader, but he also had a historic role as one of the first Indian-Americans.

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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, and even more Spokanites line up along the route to cheer on the race. While Bloomsday is clearly a Spokane event (more than half of last year’s entrants called Spokane home,) it is also one of the world’s biggest running events.

This hill on Pettet Drive, late in the course, has been affectionately nicknamed “Doomsday Hill” by runners. Gaining 120 feet of elevation in less than three quarters of a mile, it’s the steepest climb on the course. Once runners reach the top of the hill, the remaining distance runs through the thankfully level roads of West Central to the finish line on the Monroe Street Bridge. 2015’s fastest runner, Lani Rutto of Kenya, powered up the hill in just two minutes and eight seconds, but such elite runners are the exception. A costumed vulture at the top of the hill sums up most runners’ feelings about the climb.

The race began as part of a seventies craze for city running events. After competing in the marathon at the 1976 Olympics, local schoolteacher Don Kardong suggested the idea to a reporter, and it gained momentum quickly. Kardong imagined a run with “more than a hundred” runners, but the first year’s race included more than a thousand. The non-profit event grew throughout the eighties and nineties, reaching its peak of 61,298 registrations in 1996. There are serious competitors who run the race for cash prizes, but most of the growth has come from hobbyists, who run the race just for the challenge of it. David Govedare’s “The Joy of Running Together,” a collection of forty statues of runners next to City Hall, was installed in 1985 to commemorate the event. While the nationwide fad settled, Bloomsday took root.

Lilacs are a long-standing symbol of Spokane, but the name “Bloomsday” also refers to a June 16th celebration of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (even though the event falls on the logistically-simpler first Sunday in May.) Kardong saw a connection between running and heroic epics like Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey, and felt “people are looking around for a chance to be heroic.” The climb up Pettet Drive wasn’t yet part of the course, but Kardon did imagine a nearby hill on Meenach Road as the “monster” of his epic.

Race t-shirts are a staple of Spokane fashion, as well. A new shirt is designed each year, and finishers collect their shirts just past the finish line. A collection of historic Bloomsday tees is a point of pride for locals. The race organization also recognizes more than 90 “perennials” who, like Don Kardong, have run the race every year.

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Goetz's "capacity for friendship and his charity" had made him "known from one end of this country to the other"

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. Baer's house fell into disrepair after his death, and the home was condemned in 1973. The creation of Dutch Jake's Park returned this lot to its preferred role: a gathering place for the neighborhood, and a celebration of its most famous citizens.

The German-born mining tycoon Jacob Goetz, better know in Spokane as Dutch Jake, was part of this West Central neighborhood from its beginning. His role in discovering the Bunker Hill and Sullivan mines in Idaho made him his fortune, but his fame came from his generosity and sense of fun. When he opened the Spokane Hotel downtown, he was known to fire a cannon from the rooftop playground during celebrations, and his famous birthday celebrations could last for days. After his death in 1927, former Spokane mayor W. J. Hindley said that Goetz's "capacity for friendship and his charity" had made him "known from one end of this country to the other."

If that doesn't earn him a place in the city's memory, then maybe this mini-park on an extended lot in West Central will. Neighbors of the park insisted that the city council name it in Goetz's honor, refusing to even submit a list of alternative names. Construction of Dutch Jake's Park began in April of 1976. The city put a community development grant towards the construction, but members of the community also donated more than $17,000 in labor and materials. The park was dedicated in July of 1976, in a ceremony attended by Goetz's daughter, Helen Goetz Edmunds.

Though it is one of the city's smaller parks, Dutch Jake Park features a basketball court, a playground, and a picnic area. The playground originally included a rocking burro, in homage to Goetz's burro, which he said was the "real" discoverer of the Bunker Hill mine.

West Central today is a diverse and changing neighborhood, and this park is one of its few public spaces. The park is bordered by relatively low-income neighborhoods, but stands just a block from the more affluent new Kendall Yards development. A news segment in 2013 named it one of the city's most dangerous parks, citing increasing calls for police intervention in the neighborhood, but the park is also used regularly by local families. As of this writing, the park is the focus of neighborhood council plans to beautify the neighborhood and improve safety.

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A three-ring circus?

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 so little interest in new music that Gregor’s band Sweet Madness would rent warehouses to put on their shows. But Sweet Madness and Muller’s band Strangulon, among others, found a dedicated following for punk, new wave and performance art, and helped to foster a lasting scene.

And backwater or not, the city was on the map for major touring bands. After D.O.A. and Black Flag both played Spokane dates in 1985, promoter Kevin Miller admitted “we can actually bring major punk acts to Spokane.” But there was also a unique Spokane scene, with local musicians and other artists collaborating to give voice to new and controversial ideas. In 1983, for example, promoter Leslie Swalley put on “Irrigate the Cultural Wastelands,” a night of music and performance art that the Spokesman-Review called a “three-ring circus.”

On this location in 1985, Moe’s Body Shop opened as an attempt to create a lasting, all-ages space for the local punk scene. Punk acts had struggled to find space for shows. “Irrigate the Cultural Wastelands,” for instance, took place at the West Central Community Center, rather than in a club. Moe’s Body Shop was well-attended while it lasted, but it closed within months over fire code violations. 123 Arts followed a similar path in 1988. The repeated shutdowns owed something to a strained relationship between the punk scene and the rest of the community; Parents were divided over the appropriateness of punk events for younger teens, and police often broke up events. Brent Biever, one of the owners of Moe’s, said he felt they were being “discriminated against just for being creative.”

While the 1980s punk craze had faded by the end of the century, punk isn’t dead yet in Spokane. The 2011 documentary Spokanarchy! chronicles the early scene, and also collects a soundtrack of recordings by the Spokane bands featured in the film. Today, our punk and metal scene continues to support local bands. But even more, Spokane’s alternative arts scene owes something to that first wave of punk rockers carving out a space for something new.

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