USA > Washington > Spokane County > Spokane > History of the city of Spokane and Spokane County, Washington : from its earliest settlement to the present time, Volume I > Part 43
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"The Benjamins. I think, are dead.
"Lawyer Swift left here with his wife about a year after my arrival, and they too went to Santa Ana.
"It was several years after my arrival before the little settlement could show as much population as it had possessed when I came here. My wife joined me in Au- gust, 1873, and my partner, Mr. Yeaton. came with his family in July. He had a
MRS. J. J. DOWNING
First white woman in Spokane. Came here with her husband in 1871
FREDERICK POST, WHO BUILT THE FIRST FLOUR MILL IN SPOKANE
II. T. COWLEY, WHO CAME TO SPO- KANE IN 1874 AS MISSIONARY AND TEACHER AMONG THE SPOKANES
9 3-JU LIDKARY
TILWIN INONDATIONS
!
YANIT
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wife and one daughter, and the three of them are now living in or near Seattle. They stayed here till the fall of 1876.
"Mr. Matheny's family joined him in 1871. His wife was dead and his sister- in-law cared for his four children.
"My first store was just across the street and directly west of the present City Hall. It stood in about the center of the block and was a frame building. My first stock of goods was made up very largely of Indian supplies-cheap blankets, shawls, calicoes, beads, paints (I did a big business in paints), tobacco, sugar, tea and coffee, cutlery and all sorts of groceries. I never carried powder and lead, and with the exception of an old shot gun had no fire arms. I frequently loaned the shot gun to Indians, and they would occasionally bring in a deer for its use. 1 always got along pleasantly with the Indians, although I was always firm with them. From the beginning I adopted a policy of trading with them just as I would with white men. They were cautious buyers and always watched the scales very closely.
"The Indians here at the Falls were known as the Upper band of Spokanes. In summer they pitched their tents near the river, but in winter they would move back to a point near Fourth avenue and Pine street. There is a little knoll there and they had a cemetery near by. They had a couple of old sheds in a dry and well sheltered spot. When I eame they buried their dead in the earth, the same as the whites do, having been taught this method by Father Eells, the Protestant mission- ary. At their funerals they held Christian services.
"I lived in my store building, where I had partitioned off a living room, bed room and a little kitchen. Mr. Yeaton lived in the rear of the store, and Mr. Matheny in a log house on the present site of the Coeur d'Alene hotel. We built several log houses and were glad to have people come in and use them rent frec.
"I bought out Mr. Matheny in the spring of 1876 and Mr. Yeaton in the fall of the same year. I paid them their own price and they were glad to find that I was in a position to buy them out and let them go.
"Up to that time we had not increased in population, but had rather deereased. All this while I was growing more uneasy about my squatter's right. When I re- fleeted on how much I had invested, and the years of waiting, and thought that all this might be lost, if it should turn out that I was on railroad land, the thought grew pretty disturbing. At that time, the present business district from the river to the present line of the Northern Pacific tracks, was a beautiful prairie of bunch- grass and sun-flowers, and when these flowers were in bloom they made a sea of gold. I kept a horse staked out there all the time for emergency. One bright, bean- tiful morning in June, 1875, an Indian, named George, half brother to Curly dim, rode up in great excitement, his horse in a foam of perspiration, and told me that he had seen a squad of white men coming from White Bluff prairie down the Hang- man ereck slope. He described them to me and I knew they were surveyors. I told him to rest a moment till I could put a saddle on my horse, when I would go with him. We went down the road on about the same route that now leads to Green- wood cemetery, and pretty soon I met Till Sheets and his party of two line-men and two blazers. I introduced myself and he said :
" 'So you are the man they call Jim Glover? I'm trying to locate you. I had a contract from the government to survey three townships on Crab ereck. After I completed that work, I said to my men that Jim Glover is at the Spokane Falls, and
.
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don't know whether he is afoot or ahorseback. I told them that if they would give their time I would board them, and we would run a base line and show Mr. Glover where he is.'
"I soon knew that I was on government land. It was a warm day, and I was sweating like a Turk. Strange as it may appear, those lines eame just about where I wanted them. My east line was Bernard street; my south line the center of Sprague avenue; my west line was Cedar street; and my north line was Broadway, east to a point where the line makes a jog and crosses the river. My elaim included most of the bay by the Phoenix mill and took in the Centennial mill property. It then ran due south to a point at the curve of Mill street, a little north of Front avenue, and then ran due east to Bernard.
"From the beginning I had refused to deal in liquors, but when I bought my second bill of goods from Barney Goldsmith, he asked me if we had any rattle- snakes up at the Falls. I replied that there were none at the Falls, but I had seen two or three in the rocks west of there. Mr. Goldsmith then said that as I had been a pretty good customer. he was going to make me a present of a barrel of whisky. I accepted the present, but afterwards regretted that I had done so, as I had heard that Indians could smell liquor a great distanec. When the barrel of whisky arrived, I built in a little closet in my store, just big enough to hold it, and boxed the barrel in and nailed it up solid. I never tapped that barrel till Surveyor Sheets eame in, but I then felt so grateful that I ripped the boards away and gave him and his men all they could drink.
"When my partners, Matheny and Yeaton moved away, we had less population at the falls than ever. and I made extraordinary efforts to induce Frederick Post to come here from Rathdrum and build a little gristmill. I had to pull all my flour from Waitsburg, and it was a hard task. I argued long with Mr. Post, as he was a practical millwright and already had most of the necessary machinery. He was one of God's noblemen. He and his wife were old fashioned Germans, as fine people as I ever knew in my life. They had five daughters, Mary, Martha, Alice, Julia and one whose name I cannot remember. They were nice girls. All are dead except Aliee, who married a man named Martin, and they still live in the old Post house on the south side of the river at Post Falls. Mary married West Wood, Martha died single, Julia married one of the Dart family, for whom the town of Dartford on the Little Spokane was named. Mother Post died last winter, and Mr. Post about eighteen months ago.
"} finally made Mr. Post an offer he could not well resist, forty aeres of my preemption as a gift. Out of that forty aeres I reserved the block where the Audi- torium building stands. He was very anxious later to square up his forty, and begged me to sell him that Auditorium block. I finally let him have it in 1876 for $350. and he raised the money and paid me. Later he came to me and said :
" 'You are the only man I can go to for help. I am broke and you will have to take that property baek.' I replied that i was broke too but that I would take it back. In that way that piece of property passed back and forth between us five times and the price was always the same. Mr. Post finally sold it to A. M. Cannon and J. J. Browne and they built the Auditorium theatre upon it.
"The frame of the old mill stood until last year, when it was torn down. It had
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a eapaeity of twenty barrels a day, and did its first grinding about November 1, 1877.
"My sawmill had a capacity of 35,000 to 40.000 feet a day. It was a fine mill and much too large for the country. My only market was among a very few settlers as they came into the surrounding country. I would saw out 150,000 feet in four or five days and that output would supply the demand for a year."
Mr. Post's old residence was destroyed by fire in the autumn of 1911. It was attached to the old Falls View house, west of Post street and north of Front avenue.
When the Nez Peree war broke out in 1877, Spokane had a total population of less than twenty: Mr. and Mrs. Glover, Rev. and Mrs. S. G. Havermale, who, however, were hardly permanent residents, as they were coming and going from time to time. H. T. Cowley and family, and Frederick Post, his wife and five daughters. But the little frontier settlement had prospeets, and its founder had expectations for he platted a townsite in January, 1878.
"For that work I employed L. W. Rima," said Mr. Glover in diseussing pioneer times with the writer of this volume.
Mr. Rima had come here after the Nez Peree uprising and started a little jewelry store-an aet of sublime confidenee in future developments, for assuredly the imme- diate prospeet of a demand for diamonds and gold watches could not have been alluring. Rima bought a lot from Mr. Glover, on the alley on Howard street, just south of what is now the Coeur d'Alene hotel, and later built a small two-story brick building, one of the first, but not the very first structure to be erceted here of that material.
"I platted from my east line at Bernard," said Mr. Glover, "to the west line of Post street, and from Sprague avenue to the river. Sprague street I named in honor of General Sprague, then general superintendent of the western division of the Northern Paeifie. As I expected Riverside to continue westward as a boulevard or drive along the river bank, it was given that designation. Main street I rather expected to become the chief business thoroughfare, and Front was so-called because of its fronting on the stream. Washington was named jointly for the father of our country and the territory. Stevens for the first governor, Isaae I. Stevens, Howard for General O. O. Howard, who commanded the troops in the Nez Peree war, Mill beenuse 1 expected the milling industry to eenter around its terminus at the river, and Post street in recognition of Frederiek Post. I regret exceedingly that the name of Mill street was changed to Wall, a designation having no local or pioneer sig- nifieanee.
"Mr. Rima made little pretension to exaet knowledge of eivil engineering, but he had some instruments and had done a little surveying. I assisted in the work, serving as chainman. He lacked a proper chain, and later I made up my mind that there were errors in the original survey and determined to have a resurvey, henee the existence of that term in the official deseription of property in the original plat.
"For this resurvey and the platting of another seetion of my land west to Cedar street, I employed G. F. Wright, a Northern Paeifie engineer, in 1881. Mr. Wright's resurvey made a number of lots and bloeks a little larger than they had been orig- inally. and I made a great number of quitelaim deeds to persons who had previously purchased lots, granting them the additional ground without additional pay. Lin- Vol. 1~22
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coln, Monroe, Madison and Jefferson streets were so named in honor of those four presidents."
In April, 1878, came A. M. Cannon and J. J. Browne. They were from Port- land. Oregon, then the metropolis of the broad northwest, with a population of about 15,000 exclusive of Chinese, of whom the town held several thousand, lured there by railroad construction. The newcomers were to play conspicuous parts in the great drama of city building by the wild cataracts of the Spokane, and it may well be doubted if two men better fitted by courage, enthusiasm and knowledge of west- ern life and western conditions could have been found, either east or west, to take up that work and carry it forward to success and brilliant achievement. Both men had limited means, and in a sense were soldiers of fortune. Mr. Cannon had led an adventurous life from carly manhood. When a young man he had gone to Chicago and made and lost a considerable fortune on the grain exchange. From Chicago he drifted to the Pacific coast by way of Kansas City and Denver. In Portland he engaged in the business of selling sewing machines, but suffering there from sciatic rheumatism, he made up his mind to seck health and fortune in "the upper country," concerning which he had heard enticing reports, both in respect to its scenic beauty and its natural resources.
Mr. Browne's activities up to that time had been divided between the law and education, and he had served a term as county superintendent of schools at Portland. Hle was attending court at The Dalles, Oregon, when Mr. Cannon, on his way to Spokane, encountered him there and persuaded him to join in the scouting expedi- tion.
"Cannon and Browne arrived herc, I think, on the 21th of April, 1878." said Mr. Glover. "They approached me with a proposition to buy an interest in the townsite, and held out inducements in the way of boosting for the town and helping to build here an important business center. Two days later an agreement was drawn up and signed, I agreeing to sell them a half interest in my claim, excepting such portions as I had given to Mr. Post and built upon myself, and a few other lots which I had practically given away. They were to pay me $3,000 for it. $50 down, all they had, as neither man possessed any means beyond the little required to bring their families here. The final payments were not made for five or six years."
At this time Spokane's population was little larger than it had been when Mr. Glover landed by the falls in 1873. The two companies of regulars that had win- tered here after the Nez Perce war, were moving to Fort Sherman, on Lake Coeur d'Alene. The first physician was here in the person of Dr. J. M. Masterson, who brought with him a wife and three or four children; and about that time came George A. Davis and C. W. Cornelius, also from down Portland way, and started a little drugstore fronting on Front avenue and just west of Glover's store. About that time, too, came Captain J. M. Nosler, after whom Nosler's addition was named, with a few drugs from Colfax.
"Browne and Cannon returned to Portland immediately after the signing of the agreement," continues the narrative of Mr. Glover, "and in the fall of the same year Cannon returned with his family and Alexander Warner, a brother-in-law. They brought a little stock of general merchandise and set it up in my store build- ing. I having discontinued the merchandise business. They continued in business there for several years under the firm name of Cannon & Warner.
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"It was there, in a little addition I had built on the store, fronting on Howard that Mr. Cannon put out his sign, 'Bank of Spokane Falls; A. M. Cannon.' This is how the first bank was started here. At that time I was employed by the North- ern Paeifie as forage agent and to construet necessary buildings for its construction eamps, and I had to traverse the country and buy hay and grain for the horses. Most of my supplies I bought around Farmington, fifty or sixty miles south of here, for there were very few settlers produeing anything in the immediate vieinity of Spokane. D. C. Cushman and a man named Lewis were in charge of the Northern Paeifie land office at Colfax, and I had to go there to draw funds for my purchases and make settlement with the company.
"Returning from one of these trips to Colfax, great was my surprise, on stepping from the stage, to see Mr. Cannon's bank sign. When I walked into the store build- ing Mr. Cannon was the first man I met, and when we had shaken hands he said:
"'Mr. Glover, I guess you'll be greatly surprised to see what I have done.'
"'Why, what do you allude to, Mr. Cannon?'
"'I've started a bank, and you know better than I do that I haven't got a dollar ; but Mrs. Pope (a sister-in-law) had $1,000 and agreed to loan it to me. There's no business here now for a bank, but the Northern Paeifie is coming this way with its grade and construction and there will be all sorts of timecheeks and other eheeks to eash, and I thought I might as well get in and be ready to take care of it.'
"Mr. Warner, Mr. Canon's partner, was a very near-sighted man, and was bending over his books in the front of the store. When I approached him he looked up and said :
"'You see what A. M. has done? What a foolish man; over head and heels in debt and starting a bank. But if he wants to do it and run it on wind, he'll have to go it alone. I'll have nothing to do with it!'"
In November, 1882, Mr. Glover, F. Rockwood Moore, Horaee L. Cutter, H. M. MeCartney, Dr. L. H. Whitehouse, and August Goldsmith incorporated the First National bank of Spokane. It was capitalized at $50,000 and was housed in a two story wooden building, at the corner of Main and Howard, fronting on Main.
"Mr. Cannon came to me one day," says Mr. Glover, "and said his bank was in trouble and he wanted help. I replied that our bank could not extend help until we had first looked over his affairs and seen what he had in his institution. I went in with him and his eashier B. L. Bennett, early in the morning before banking hours, to see what he had in the way of money and securities. I found a most deso- late and woebegone situation ; 25 cents was all the eash on hand. I asked Cashier Bennett why he had not bought a drink with the two-bits, and he replied that it belonged to the bank. We decided that if Mr. Cannon would give us such collateral as he had, and a note signed by himself and wife, seeured by certain pieces of real estate, that we would advanee him $1,000 or $5,000. His word was good and I knew he would meet any obligation that lay within his power. He gradually paid us baek.
"Mr. Browne eame haek either in the fall of 1878 or 1879 with his family. For a while he rented rooms and boarded with Mr. Post. I had two offiees in my store building on the second floor, and he took one of them as a law office. His first house was in what is now Browne's addition. My first claim was a preemption, and I bad homesteaded 160 aeres west of it. This I relinquished to Mr. Browne. I took my
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team and plowed ground for his garden and orchard at a place just south of Pacific avenue and west of Maple street. Mr. Browne and family lived there until he built the large briek place further west in his addition, the place that is now owned by R. E. Strahorn.
"Mr. Cannon also took a homestead, covering what is now Cannon's addition and Cannon Hill, but had established no residence on it, his only improvement being the digging of a trench and the setting of a few pine poles. I had as my elerk in my railroad work, a very fine young man, Howard Tilton, son of General Tilton, a close friend of Superintendent Sprague. Howard was very much taken with Spo- kane, and not considering Mr. Cannon's improvements a compliance with the law located himself upon the same claim, built a little shack and was living there. One day as I was returning from Colfax, on reaching the town of Spangle, I was in- formed by Mr. Spangle that a great row had taken place up in Spokane and a num- ber of shots had been fired. I hastened on to Spokane and learned that a mask ball had been given at the California house, and that after the ball was over the party had gone out to Tilton's shack with guns and revolvers, driven Tilton out of his place and demolished it. Tilton had a revolver and fired several shots in return. I never did find out the names of the men who were in the raid. Mr. Cannon assured mc that he had no hand in the affair, and both he and Mr. Browne urged me to write to General Sprague asking him to recall Tilton and give him employment at some other place. Although I disliked to do this, I consented in the interest of peace and the harmony of the community, and the young man was ealled away and given work at Tacoma. Years later I met him in San Francisco, and he said the one great regret of his life was that he had not resisted my advice and held his elaim. This happened in the winter of '79 and '80.
"For a long time the Cannons and Warners lived in the building that I had used as my first store, and when the Cannons moved it was into a little frame house that Mr. Cannon had built for his homestead. Mr. Cannon's wife was a widow when he married her, and they had a good sized family of young men and women. There were Ralph Clark ; Marie, who married B. H. Bennett in Spokane, and who after the death of Mr. Bennett became the wife of M. D. Wright, now of Hayden Lake: George, who died and was buried here; Kitty, who married J. R. Allen, a railroad engineer who, I learn, afterwards made a great fortune in South America. and is now living in New York ; Josephine, the youngest is married and living in London. Mr. Cannon's father lived with him and died and was buried here. The family came from Illinois, and two brothers followed Mr. Cannon to Spokane and took up their residences here.
"Colonel D. P. Jenkins came in the spring of 1880, and took a homestead on the north side. The Court House now stands upon his homestead. The river had not been bridged and Jenkins' only means of communication between the town and his claim was a little boat which he kept tied just below the falls. He practiced law a little, but at that time legal business was not extensive and there was not much to do beyond the making out of deeds and other papers.
"About the same time Robert W. Forrest, who afterwards became Spokane's first mayor, located here and operated the first ferry across the Spokane. It was a little flatboat, propelled by man power, and ran at a point cast of the Division street bridge, just where the river makes a bend.
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"Franeis H. Cook came in 1879 and started that year, Spokane's first newspaper, the Weekly Times. I gave him the lot at the southeast corner of Riverside and Howard as an inducement to his starting the paper, sixty feet by a hundred and eighty running through to Sprague. This corner is now covered in part by the Whitehouse store and Rookery building. He constructed a little two story wooden building, and there is where he operated that paper. Mr. Cook was aggressive in some of his utterances and in one article gave deep offense to Mr. Cannon and Mr. Cannon's son-in-law, B. H. Bennett. The two went up to demand a retraction and it was said that Bennett carried a revolver and used it menacingly towards Cook, but the results were not what they had expected. for Cook came at them with a heavy iron bar, a piece of his mechanical equipment, beating Bennett over the head with it and finally kieking him down stairs."
At this period an interesting feud had grown up in the community over the proper way of spelling the name "Spokane." One party under the leadership of Editor Cook stood valorously for "Spokan." without the final "e." The other felt that the fate of the future great city depended on the final "e." In a smaller way the controversy became as tense and acerimonious as the historie feud between Guelph and Ghibelline, and the final "e" party determined that an opposition news- paper must be established. Accordingly they entered into negotiations with an editor named Carlisle, and dispatched him to Portland to purchase a printing plant. Editor Carlisle was subsidized in this great undertaking by Glover, Browne and Cannon, and the result was the founding of the Spokane Chronicle.
From the beginning, Mr. Glover adopted a freehanded policy of encouraging newcomers by outright donations of corner lots, any one of which would now com- mand a good sized fortune on the real estate market of Spokane.
The reader will recall that C. F. Yeaton was one of his partners in the original enterprise, but subsequently becoming dissatisfied, sold ont his interest and returned to Oregon. When Yeaton learned that two companies of regular soldiers had gone into winter quarters at Spokane, and Spokane in consequence was enjoying its first boom, he wrote to Mr. Glover asking means to bring himself, wife and daughter back to the falls, and an opportunity to take charge of Mr. Glover's store, suggesting further that possibly he might get something to do in connection with the military people. Mr. Glover forwarded Yeaton what little money he could scrape up and the Yeatons promptly acknowledged its receipt by putting themselves in evidence. Mr. Glover put them in the store and a little later used his influence with Colonel Conrad, Captain Daggett and such other army officers as he could reach, to secure Yeaton's appointment as post-trader at Fort Sherman. Yeaton retained that place for six or seven years, and prospered immensely, accumulating a fortune of $35,000. Then he grew weary of the life of a post-trader, disposed of his interests, and de- cided to move out of the country. Before going to California the Yeatons spent several days visiting Mr. Glover.
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