Extending upstream from where you stand is Inspiration Point and the monuments to the so-called Christian Pioneers. Funded and dedicated by an ecumenical collection of local churches, the monument was meant to inform visitors at Expo 74 of the contributions of the earliest Christian residents of the Inland Northwest. But, like many monuments to the pioneers, the plaques try to squeeze whole, completed lives into a few sentences.

The journeys of the early Protestant missionaries over the Rockies predated cameras, so when you look at Cushing and Myra Eells of Tshimkain, they appear perpetually old. But, when they crossed the American continent, they were young adults who kept diaries and notes of their journeys. Soon after their departure for the Northwest, Myra began to note and comments on the presence of Indians. In late April and early May, she marvels at the Indians coming to see them cross rivers. Writing tersely on May 1, "Meet Indians at every encampment." Despite meeting Indians to share her religion being her purpose, their appearance seemed to pique her curiosity even until the end of the crossing.

By contrast, Mary Walker dwelt on the natural world frequently and even interpreted it in a fanciful light. Passing through the country around Chimney Rock at the end of May, she writes, "Scenery beautiful. The bluffs resemble temples, castles, forts, &c. As if nature tired of waiting the advances of civilization had erected her own temples &c." Thus, she hopes that the natural world anticipates her own work.

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You are standing next to the clock tower of the former Great Northern station. It is one of the few surviving remnants of Havermale Island as it was from the first years of the 20th century until Expo '74. Though it is one of the only remains of Spokane's industrial Havermale Island, it stands today as a reminder of the railroads that built Spokane into a thriving city.

Spokane, like many towns in the American West, was transformed by its rail industry. The city's growth depended on the commerce and capital of railroads. Early on, Spokane relied heavily on the rails potential to bring in tourists and new residents. The Northern Pacific rail line connected the small town of Spokane to its web of routes in 1884. In its own traveler's guide of 1889, the railroad spent more time praising bucolic fishing and the roar of the falls than the city's industrial potential. Spokane was a picturesque tourist destination among the basalt columns and pines.

Naturally, local boosters saw it differently. In their own promotional guide, "the date from which the growth of the city is to be counted" was 1884 rather than 1873. And, further, that growth would be in the manufacturing of timber and agricultural products and not tourism. Even more important was the rail connection to the mining districts of northeastern Washington and northern Idaho. To boosters, this made Spokane far more important than "Denver, Salt Lake, Butte or Helena" because "those cities are drawing on Spokane's tributary mining districts for supplies of ore."

Within a decade, local rail lines began to radiate out to the mining and agricultural hinterlands and additional transcontinental lines passed in or close to the city. Men poured in to work on these projects. From Spokane, the Central Washington Railway embraced the country of the Big Bend of the Columbia in 1890. Shooting northward, the Spokane International Railway crossed the Canadian border and joined with the Canadian Pacific line and the mining country of the Canadian Kootenays. The Great Northern Railroad sited a rail yard at Hillyard and a grand station in central Spokane. In 1914, the Union Pacific and Milwaukee Road finished construction on a viaduct which hugged the Spokane River before crossing to a new artificial hill on its north bank.

The completion of this viaduct, even though it further hid not only the falls but also the new Monroe Street Bridge, was greeted with great fanfare by the community and the railroad companies. Unknown to Spokanites, it was also to be the last hurrah of the rail boom. As new construction slowed, so too did the frantic growth of the city. Trains would clatter and bustle over the Spokane River for another fifty years, transforming the city by increments rather than leaps and bounds.

By the 1970s, many began to see the heavy downtown presence of the rails as a nuisance. The major rail yards established on the banks of the Spokane River were removed to make way for Expo '74. Today, Riverfront Park stands where the heart of Spokane's industry once stood. The Great Northern clock tower reminds visitors of the city's history and its booming rails.

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You are now looking at the Lower Falls of the Spokane River. This site was important in both the legends and daily lives of the Spokane, the Coeur d'Alene and others in this region.

In one story, the Spokane River and its gorge were formed when an imprisoned monster broke free of its bonds near the Columbia River and cut a scar in the earth as it fled to Lake Coeur d'Alene. In another, a Coeur d'Alene woman rejected the romantic interest of Coyote. Unable to get help from the Spokane or the Kalispel in seducing or kidnapping the woman, the trickster used magic to build a barrier between the salmon and the Coeur d'Alene people.

The last legend reveals a little of the importance of the falls as a gathering place for fish and people during salmon runs. Blocked by the falls, salmon congregated in the gravel beds of the Spokane River to spawn. For thousands of years, this mass of fish drew people to catch them. Once speared, fish could be laid out onto frames and smoked or skewered and then roasted close to a fire.

Like Kettle Falls and Celilo Falls, these falls drew people from such a long distance that a regular route existed between here and the upper stretches of the Pend d'Oreille River. This "Skeetshoo Road," as the first white visitors dubbed it, connected the Kalispel to the Spokane and the Coeur d'Alene, the three peoples mentioned in the Coeur d'Alene legend.

But it wasn't Coyote who finally blocked all of the salmon runs on the Spokane River, but Long Lake Dam. Built in 1915, this dam cut off fish from the falls, ending utterly a way of life and leaving only the memory of salmon.

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Surrounded by a grotto of basalt columns is one of the most perennially popular remnants of Riverfront Park's past - the "Garbage Goat." Sculpted by Sister Paula Turnbull, a local nun and leading figure in Inland Northwest arts, this statue seems like an unlikely source of controversy. Yet, it became part of one of the oddest and longest-lasting debates during Expo '74. Highlighting the hidden tensions of the fair's themes and exposing the attitudes of Spokanites and fair visitors alike, this steel goat became a cipher for understanding the world's fair.

It all began as an effort to keep the new riverfront environment fresh and free of paper and other waste during the busy fair months. The Spokane Women's Council of Realtors sponsored a unique trash collector - a goat sculpture. Installed at the end of April 1974, it was unlike both typical sculptures and typical trashcans. A recorded voice asked for garbage when visitors approached. Then, at the press of a button, a powerful suction device pulled refuse into the goat's mouth.

Even before it was added to the fair site, dairy goat farmers protested showing goats as living trash compactors. Kent Leach, editor of The Dairy Goat Journal, called the vacuum system disguised as a goat a "degrading, debasing, and grossly misleading" addition to the fair. Dairy goats, another letter-writer argued, were "most fastidious in their eating habits." Writing to The Spokane Chronicle, John R. Hollister of Deer Park said that the public needed to be educated "to the fact that a goat should be properly fed like any other creature." At fairs, their prize-winning goats were sickened by "all manner of trash" fed to them by young and old alike.

Despite these pleas from goat farmers and goat lovers, the statue motivated more than a few defenders. On June 27th, 1974, The Spokane Chronicle's column "The EXPOsitor" challenged readers "to find a scrap of loose paper, tin or glass within 50 children's feet of the grotto." Ardent "garbage goat" defender, A.A. Sellen claimed that "joy reigned supreme in the happiest and cleanest corner on Expo grounds" when the goat was in operation. Temporarily turned off, however, the goat "lost his winsome voice" and "children and oldsters turn away sadly and soon desert this corner of gloom."

In this and other controversies, fair decisions were both praised and condemned in environmental terms. So, the Expo '74 organizers compromised with the goat farmers and added signage on real dairy goats. With the zeal of ad copy, a new plaque described how on the "finest of hays and grains," a goat could produce "3 to 7 quarts" of "the ultimate milk for a family." Reflecting the ironically combined environmental and entrepreneurial spirit of Expo '74, it described the goat as "a most economical, true ecological animal."

The fair organizers remained interested in "Celebrating a Fresh, New Environment," with an emphasis on "celebrate" even when the environmental choice was unclear.

And even when it got a few goats.

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Standing on the bridge between Canada and Havermale Islands, you can see one of the many restorations of the Spokane Falls that began with Expo '74. The spray and splash of the falls during the annual spring and early summer snow melt is familiar to Spokanites and visitors alike but the gurgles of late summer and autumn are a late legacy of that world's fair.

Washington Water Power, today known as Avista, traditionally managed their dams on the Spokane River, from Post Falls to Long Lake, almost exclusively to generate electrical power. The powerhouse turbines on Havermale Island spun with the diverted power of the Spokane River and the falls were sometimes dry for weeks at a time. Just before Expo '74, city boosters arranged for the power company to release additional water for visiting dignitaries. Uncertain about awarding a world's fair to a city as small as Spokane, the roaring falls were meant to instill in them a sense of wonder and convince them to hold the fair there. During the summer and fall of Expo '74, when even the free-flowing river would have been only murmuring and slapping on basalt, the illusion was recreated for fair visitors. Water roared below the American pavilion and around Canada Island. The river flowed full-time again through the center of the city, if only for a brief season.

Though it had initiated only temporary changes, Expo '74 had also anticipated a more complete restoration of the falls of the Spokane River. Still, into the new century they often remained as "dry and quiet as a graveyard" as Sherman Alexie wrote in the mid-1990s. And a graveyard they often were, as the evaporation of puddles in the summer heat left dangerous toxins from a century of mining and manufacturing exposed on the bare rock.

After a long period of negotiation between the Sierra Club and other environmental groups on one side and Avista on the other, full-time flows were restored in the gorge of the Spokane River in 2009.

Even on the driest days, water now trickles in the grooves of volcanic columns. One can look down in not only April and May but also in June and January and see the water of the river once again at work on the landscape.

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The Spokane River gorge has undergone many transformations in the last century. Don't be distracted by the roar of the falls; look at the riverfront. Until 2011, the trees, shrubs, and concrete remnants you see here were the former YMCA headquarters. While that is not long ago, they are part of a story that began at the turn of the 20th century.

In 1914, the Board of Parks Commissioners hired the Olmsted Brothers, sons of journalist and landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted, to outline a plan for the city's parks. Their report called for four large parks to help calm the "continual strain of the nerves" among urban dwellers caused by the "multitudinous harsh noises and the vivid and eye-tiring sights" of the city. The centerpiece was a proposed Gorge Park, where in the face of continuing industrial construction, the brothers urged the city to "preserve what beauty and grandeur remains of its great river gorge." Unfortunately, their ideas would be buried under another fifty years of commercial development.

By the mid-1960s, the Park Board and Plan Commission began to call for "appropriate riverfront development, including landscaped areas, vistas, commercial recreation, cultural facilities, public buildings, parks, zoos or zoolets, river drives and paths, and encouraging appropriate offices and business establishments and apartments" along with "the removal of railroad trackage" from the riverfront and Havermale Island. At the same time, the YMCA of the Inland Northwest purchased land and built a new home on the northern edge of the island.

The vision of both the Park Board and the YMCA soon merged with the urban renewal plans of Expo 74. Its theme: "Celebrating Tomorrow's Fresh New Environment." The six-month festival brought 5.6 million people to Spokane, and its physical legacy includes Riverfront Park, the Spokane Convention Center and the INB Performing Arts Center. Expo '74 also restored access to Spokane's falls and gorge, breathing new life into the 1908 Olmsted park plan and reflecting a national trend of rediscovered urban waterfronts.

When the exhibitors left, the Park Board transformed the Expo grounds into the natural and artificial landscapes of Riverfront Park. The YMCA building had worked double duty as the fair headquarters and was now surrounded by saplings and lawns.

In 2006, as the YMCA prepared to move to a new location north of the river, they placed the building in Riverfront Park on the market. Developer Mark Pinch arranged to buy it in order to build a 14-story condominium tower, which he compared to San Antonio's Riverwalk. The city had right of first refusal but struggled to cobble together funding during the recession of the late 2000s. Proposals and counterproposals flew, ranging from turning the old building into a museum to using it as office space to allowing Pinch to buy it.

Finally, during the spring and early summer of 2011, fences surrounded the site and backhoes and jackhammers pounded concrete. The building wasn't being removed for office space, a museum, or a tower but for trees and shrubs to match those across the channel. Park visitors will one day be able to stand in a green tunnel opening to white water and black basalt.

MAC 100 Stories: A Centennial Exhibition is told on the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture campus in Spokane's Browne's Addition, with additional highlights at 15 sites in Spokane and eastern Washington. The exhibit experience (February 22, 2014 - January 2016) weaves stories and programs about Inland Northwest people, places and events by capitalizing on the MAC's extraordinary collection. www.northwestmuseum.org

Spokane Historical presents 15 regional and city tours in partnership with the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture and its 100 Stories exhibition.

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For nineteenth-century pioneers like James Glover, falling water represented power - the power to grind flour, to saw logs, and to build a city. These were the fundamental industrial activities in a region still rich in timber and already rich in grain and they would draw people to the village of Spokane Falls. The mill business, though lucrative, was also volatile. Owners made their profits then quickly sold out and moved on. As this doggrel from The Spokesman-Review put it:

"There was Simon, who built him a mill,
And dressed dudish sufficient to kill
On the banks of this stream
Ah it seems like a dream.
He's departed, but it's with us still."

But mills were also literally volatile. Flour and sawdust were both explosive and flammable. This spot was the site of the Spokane Mill Co., which survived the Great Fire of 1889 only to partially burn in 1892. To trap logs coming down the Spokane River, the mill companies filled the southern channel with earth.

Electricity in Spokane began in 1885 with a single generator in the Spokane Flour Mill. Demand grew rapidly, and four years later local investors formed Washington Water Power and built a power station near Monroe Street. The company ran electric streetcars to encourage residential expansion and grow the market for electricity. By 1920, Washington Water Power had electrified the Hillyard rail yards, built a 100-mile transmission line to the mines and constructed three dams along the Spokane River. Electrification brought enormous social and economic progress, but the dams that generated that power permanently altered the landscape and the fishing traditions of the Plateau tribes.

Harnessing the river defined Spokane as a community before, during and after the mining and railroad booms. In 1897, The Spokesman-Review asked its readers to celebrate the Spokane River in verse, and even the most satirical poems lauded the manifest and majestic power of the falls.

As years of European-American settlement passed into decades, the edge of the river became encrusted by businesses that depended on its power and water. Spokane was enriched by its namesake river, but only sometimes remembered it.

MAC 100 Stories: A Centennial Exhibition is told on the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture campus in Spokane's Browne's Addition, with additional highlights at 15 sites in Spokane and eastern Washington. The exhibit experience (February 22, 2014 - January 2016) weaves stories and programs about Inland Northwest people, places and events by capitalizing on the MAC's extraordinary collection. www.northwestmuseum.org

Spokane Historical presents 15 regional and city tours in partnership with the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture and its 100 Stories exhibition.

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