On a day of celebration and unity, tragedy in Spokane was narrowly averted.

Monday, January 17, 2011, was a cold brisk morning, but there was reason to be in downtown Spokane. The annual Martin Luther King Jr. Unity March was about to begin and thousands of people prepared to march. As participants were lining up, around 9:26 AM, a city worker noticed a suspicious black backpack sitting on a bench at the corner of Main Avenue and Washington Street. Spokane Police officers recognized the potential danger and the Unity March was rerouted away from the area.

Inside the backpack was a homemade bomb, designed to kill and injure participants in the Unity March. Parts of the bomb were even laced with rat poison to maximize the amount of damage inflicted on the marchers. The Spokesman-Review reported that Spokane Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick said of the bomb: “It’s not like some of the other types of devices I have seen in Spokane or in my career. This is one of sophistication.”

In addition to the bomb, the backpack also contained a couple of custom made t-shirts that would help investigators with their case. The investigation narrowed on a man named Kevin William Harpham of Colville. The 37-year-old ex-soldier was a member of the National Alliance, a white supremacist organization. Investigators were able to identify some of the components of the bomb. When police surveyed stores throughout the Pacific Northwest about purchases for the components they were able to link Harpham to the bomb. He was under federal surveillance for close to a month before a DNA sample that had been taken during his time in the Army was linked to the DNA found on the strap of the backpack that held the bomb. Harpham was sentenced to 32 years in prison in December of 2011.

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This powder magazine once held the latest weapons of war, along with tons of gunpowder.

Soldiers need weapons, and in the era of combustible black powder, a safe place to store weapons and ammunition was especially important. Powder magazines like this one were present on every military base.

Black powder is inherently dangerous and accidents were common in 19th century America. To avoid disaster, the black powder was isolated in fireproof buildings away from the living quarters.

Soldiers of Fort Spokane were typically issued one of two kinds of rifles during their service. Before 1894 they were issued the Model 1873 .45 Springfield rifle. This was a breech loaded single shot rifle that used the black powder stored in the forts powder magazine. There was a shorter, easier to handle carbine variant of the rifle used by cavalry troops. After 1894 the Army began to adopt the Danish Krag-Jorgensen rifle. This rifle featured a bolt-action mechanism and its own internal magazine storage for ammunition. Soldiers could fire faster, reload quicker, and also benefited from the smokeless powder the ammunition used.

Along with their rifles, soldiers at Fort Spokane were supported with a few different field guns. The fort had two to four of these field guns, There is a good chance that they were old artillery pieces from the Civil War, known as 12-pounder Napoleons. They fired 12 pound projectiles with black powder stored from the powder magazine. Even though the fort saw no military action with Native Americans, there’s a good chance that at least one of the field guns was used to sound reveille in the mornings. In addition to these field guns, the Fort was also assigned a Hotchkiss gun.

In 1898, the 16th Infantry of Fort Spokane was deployed to Cuba to fight in the Spanish-American War, bringing with them their Hotchkiss gun and other weapons that had been stored here. The Army would never return.

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Soldiers of Fort Spokane acted as a buffer between the Indian reservations and white settlers

Soldiers packed their bags and wrote farewell letters to their families. The call for war had sounded, and the elements of the 16th infantry regiment stationed at Fort Spokane had been activated for deployment. The year was 1898 and the Spanish American War had begun. The 16th regiment fought with great honor. Some are even said to have fought alongside Teddy Roosevelt at the battle of San Juan Hill. But it was also the end of an era: After the war, soldiers would never again be stationed at Fort Spokane.

The last Army fort established in the American West, Fort Spokane was founded in 1880. Where other forts were established to pacify Indians, Fort Spokane was established both to keep the Indians on their newly established reservations and to prevent white settlers from encroaching on reservations lands. After the Civil War, the Army only stationed small units at outposts like Fort Spokane. A few infantry companies with an attached cavalry company, or about a battalion worth of soldiers, would garrison the fort. Over the years the fort would be home to elements of the 2nd, 4th, and eventually the 16th infantry regiments, while cavalry units came from the 1st and 2nd cavalry regiments. The total number of men assigned to the fort was never more than 300.

Despite the lack of combat, soldiers drilled regularly and kept to a strict schedule. Training at Fort Spokane included drills, rifle marksmanship, dress inspections, and maneuvers outside the fort. In addition to these typical soldierly duties, soldiers were also assigned unorthodox jobs, or “billets,” to make up for the lack of non-military support at the remote fort. Billets included cook, baker, treasurer, janitor, and working parties for cutting down trees, gardening, and breaking ice in the winter. Officers had their own unique billets as well, but these were typically administrative jobs rather than manual labor.

Officers and enlisted men lived separate lives. The enlisted lived in shared barracks while officers occupied their own row of individual houses, across the parade grounds from the barracks. Outside of training, the two groups rarely interacted. The exceptions to this were in the salon and on the baseball diamond. Over-indulgence with alcohol was the primary reason for court martials during the fort’s history.

When the soldiers of the 16th Infantry left the fort in 1898, the fort’s mission as an army outpost came to an end. A skeleton crew stayed behind to care for the fort, but left the following year. Soon the fort was transferred to the Department of the Interior, which would re-open it as a boarding school for Indian children in the region.

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