Spokane, Washington

• 1. Introduction

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  Spokane sits at the center of something its residents call the Inland Northwest, a region of mines, wheat fields, and rivers that stretches across eastern Washington, northern Idaho, and beyond. The Spokane River cuts right through the city's downtown, tumbling over a series of waterfalls that caught the eye of every settler, trader, and speculator who ever passed through. With a population of 228,989 at the 2020 census, Spokane is the second-most populous city in Washington state, trailing only Seattle, yet it feels like a different world from the rainy coast 280 miles to the west.

  The city carries several identities at once. It is officially nicknamed Hooptown USA, home to Spokane Hoopfest, which claims the title of the world's largest basketball tournament. It calls itself the Lilac City, named for a flowering shrub introduced in the early 20th century. And it is recognized as the birthplace of Father's Day, a holiday whose origins trace to a single sermon heard in a Spokane church in the early 1900s.

  Beneath these cheerful monikers lies a more complicated story. Spokane grew fast, burned, rebuilt, boomed on gold and silver, stagnated, hosted a World's Fair, struggled with crime and economic decline, and has spent recent decades trying to reinvent itself around medicine and technology. How did a trading post established in 1810 become a city that once ranked first on a list of worst places for jobs in America? And what does the name Spokane actually mean? The answers run deeper than any nickname.

• 2. Children of the Sun

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  Human remains found in the Spokane area have been dated to between 8,000 and 13,000 years ago, placing people here long before any European explorer arrived. The Spokane tribe, whose name in the Salishan language means "children of the sun" or "sun people", are believed to be descendants of those early hunter-gatherers, or possibly descendants of people who migrated from the Great Plains. When early white explorers asked the Spokanes where their ancestors came from, the answer was simply "up North."

  The first white men the Spokanes ever encountered were two fur trappers sent west of the Rocky Mountains by the Northwest Fur Company in the early 19th century. The Spokanes believed these strangers to be sacred, and sheltered them in the Colville River valley for the winter.

  Formal European exploration came through the explorer-geographer David Thompson, who led the North West Company's Columbia Department and was the first European to traverse what is now called the Inland Northwest. Crossing from British Columbia, Thompson wanted to push the fur trade further south. He dispatched two men, Jacques Raphael Finlay and Finan McDonald, to build a trading post on the Spokane River. In 1810, that post was established at the confluence of the Little Spokane and Spokane rivers, making it the first enduring European settlement of significance in what later became Washington state. Known as the Spokane House, it operated from 1810 to 1826 under both the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company, serving as the headquarters of the fur trade between the Rocky and Cascade mountains for 16 years.

  When the Hudson's Bay Company absorbed the North West Company in 1821, the main operations at Spokane House gradually shifted north to Fort Colville. The post faded, but the name it carried would attach itself to the land, the river, and eventually the city that grew along the falls.

• 3. Fire, Rails, and Gold

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  J.J. Downing and S.R. Scranton, cattle ranchers, were the first American settlers to plant themselves at Spokane Falls, in 1871, building a small sawmill near the south bank of the falls. Two Oregonians, James N. Glover and Jasper Matheney, passed through in 1873, recognized the water-power potential of the falls, and bought the settlers' 160-acre claim and sawmill for a total of $4,000. Glover held on when Matheney sold his share, became the city's second mayor, and was later called the "Father of Spokane".

  The real catalyst was steel. By the 30th of June 1881, the Northern Pacific Railway had reached the city, bringing a wave of settlers. The city was formally incorporated on the 29th of November 1881, with a population of about 1,000 residents. Robert W. Forrest was elected its first mayor, overseeing a council of seven who served without pay.

  Two years after incorporation, gold, silver, and lead were discovered in the Coeur d'Alene region of northern Idaho. From 1883 to 1892, the Inland Empire erupted with successive mining rushes. Spokane positioned itself as the supply depot, offering prospectors low prices on everything described as "from a horse to a frying pan," and its rail infrastructure made it indispensable.

  Then, on the 4th of August 1889, a fire broke out just after 6:00 p.m. A pump station failure meant there was no water pressure when the blaze started. Firefighters attempted to starve the fire by demolishing buildings with dynamite. When the winds finally died, 32 blocks of downtown Spokane had been destroyed and one person had been killed. The rebuilt city, however, grew faster than the one it replaced. Architect Kirtland Kelsey Cutter, self-taught and arriving in Spokane in 1886, redesigned much of the downtown in the Romanesque Revival style. His commissions included the Monroe Street Bridge, the Steam Plant, and the Davenport Hotel, which cost two million dollars and opened in September 1914 with innovations like chilled water and air cooling. The city was formally reincorporated under the name "Spokane" in 1891, leaving the old "Spokane Falls" designation behind.

  By 1910 the population had reached 104,000. Spokane had become one of the most important rail centers in the western United States, connected to mines in the Silver Valley and wheat farms across the Palouse, with farmers shipping livestock and grain to ports as distant as Liverpool and Tokyo.

• 4. Wobblies and Stagnation

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  Expansion stopped abruptly in the 1910s. Control of regional mines and resources shifted to national corporations, pulling capital out of Spokane and draining investment opportunities. What followed was a period of unemployment and labor unrest centered on the practices of "job sharks," employment agencies that charged fees to place workers in logging camps, then paid bribes to fire entire crews periodically so they could collect the fees again.

  The Industrial Workers of the World, known widely as the Wobblies, had been building grievances against these agencies for years. In September 1908, they launched a free speech fight by deliberately violating a city ordinance against soapboxing. Union members from across the western states traveled to Spokane to participate in what had become a public demonstration. Among those incarcerated was Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a feminist labor leader, who later published her account of the episode in the local publication called the Industrial Worker.

  After mining declined at the turn of the 20th century, agriculture and logging took over as the primary drivers of the economy, but Spokane faced structural disadvantages. Rail freight rates were so much higher in Spokane than in coastal cities like Seattle and Portland that merchants in Minneapolis could ship goods to Seattle and back to Spokane for less than shipping directly to Spokane, even though the rail line passed right through the city.

  The 1920 census showed a net increase of just 35 individuals for the decade, meaning thousands had left the city when accounting for natural population growth. City boosters responded by marketing Spokane as a quiet, comfortable place for raising families, a significant retreat from the dynamic commercial identity the city had once claimed. On the morning of the 15th of December 1915, the collapse of the Division Street Bridge killed five people and injured over 20, a loss that weighed on local morale for years. The situation improved only slightly with World War II, when aluminum production began in Spokane, fueled by cheap electricity from regional dams and wartime demand for aircraft.

• 5. Expo '74 and the Urban Reinvention

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  In the early 1960s, Spokane businessmen formed an organization called Spokane Unlimited with the explicit goal of revitalizing the downtown. Their preferred idea was a recreation park built around the Spokane Falls. After negotiating the relocation of railroad facilities from Havermale Island, they put forward a proposal to host a World's Fair.

  On May 4, Expo '74 opened, making Spokane the smallest city at the time to have ever hosted a World's Fair, and the first to center one entirely on an environmental theme. The fair transformed Spokane's downtown by removing roughly a century of accumulated railroad infrastructure and reconfiguring the urban core. When it closed, the fairgrounds became Riverfront Park, a 100-acre public space in the heart of the city that still contains, among other features, a hand-carved carousel created in 1909 by Charles I. D. Looff.

  The recovery was uneven. Growth in the late 1970s and early 1980s was cut short by a U.S. recession in 1981, which dropped prices for silver, timber, and farm goods simultaneously. The Kaiser Aluminum plant, which had become a significant local employer, cycled through layoffs, pension cuts, a labor strike lasting from 1998 to 1999, and finally bankruptcy in 2002. Forbes named Spokane the "Scam Capital of America" in 2009, citing widespread business fraud that analysts noted had been appearing in the record as far back as 1988.

  Still, some diversification took root. Technology firms including Key Tronic established operations in the city, reducing Spokane's historic dependence on extracting and processing natural resources. Avista Corporation, the holding company of Avista Utilities, became the only Spokane company ever ranked in the Fortune 500, reaching 299 on the list in 2002. The opening of River Park Square in 1999 sparked a downtown building cycle that brought the Spokane Arena and an expanded convention center, and the renovation of the Davenport Hotel brought back a landmark that had sat vacant for more than 20 years.

• 6. Father's Day and the Lilac City

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  Sonora Smart Dodd conceived the idea for Father's Day while sitting in Spokane's Central Methodist Episcopal Church, listening to a Mother's Day sermon. She began a national movement that ultimately led to Father's Day being established as a holiday in the United States. The first observation of Father's Day in Spokane took place on the 19th of June 1910.

  The city's unofficial nickname, the Lilac City, comes from a flowering shrub that was introduced to the area in the early 20th century and flourished in the local climate. Every spring the Lilac Bloomsday Run draws international competitors to a 7.46-mile course run on the first Sunday of May. The Lilac Festival, also held in May, honors the military and celebrates youth.

  Spokane Hoopfest, held each June, is a 3-on-3 basketball tournament that claims the title of the world's largest of its kind, which is why the city's official nickname is Hooptown USA. Also rooted in Spokane's cultural calendar is Pig Out in the Park, an annual six-day food and music festival held in Riverfront Park featuring local, regional, and national recording artists.

  The Bing Crosby Theater takes its name from a performer who grew up in Spokane. The Metropolitan Performing Arts Center, restored in 1988, was renamed in his honor in 2006. On the campus of Gonzaga University, the Crosby House holds what is described as the world's largest Crosby collection, with around 200 pieces. The Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox, restored to its original 1931 Art Deco state after years of vacancy, is home to the Spokane Symphony Orchestra. Gonzaga University itself was founded in 1887 by Italian-born priest Joseph Cataldo and the Jesuits, with Whitworth University following three years later and eventually moving to north Spokane in 1914.

• 7. A City Still Becoming

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  Spokane has 18 recognized National Register Historical Districts, more than most cities of its size, a record shaped by the speed at which it built and the difficulty it had in sustaining the momentum. The ponderosa pine is the official tree of the city, chosen partly because Spokane is the location where specimens were first collected by botanist David Douglas in 1826.

  The demographics have shifted considerably in recent decades. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought a large influx of immigrants from Russia and Ukraine; by the 2000 census, people of Russian or Ukrainian ancestry numbered 7,700 in Spokane County alone. The Pacific Islander community has grown to become the third-largest minority group in the county. The city's Chinatown, which had served as a hub for Asian residents from the city's early railroad days and experienced a population surge during World War II, was eventually demolished in the lead-up to Expo '74.

  In 2023, Spokane permanently changed its zoning rules to allow up to six housing units on any residential lot, as well as permitting grocery stores, schools, and churches in residential areas, a sharp reversal from the restrictive zoning put in place in the middle of the 20th century, which city records show was frequently motivated by the desire to exclude racial minorities from certain neighborhoods.

  As of 2013, the five largest employers in Spokane were the State of Washington, Spokane Public Schools, Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center and Children's Hospital, the 92d Air Refueling Wing at Fairchild Air Force Base, and Spokane County. The University District has expanded with two medical school branches, and Fortune 1000 companies including Itron and F5, Inc. have established offices in the area. The Kendall Yards development, one of the largest construction projects in the city's history, is blending residential and retail space along the north bank of the Spokane River, continuing the city's long pattern of rebuilding itself around the falls at its center.