100 years ago in Spokane: James Glover, ‘the father of Spokane,’ describes Spokane Falls in 1873

James N. Glover, “the father of Spokane,” continued his series of memoirs in the Spokane Daily Chronicle.

He described his first visit in 1873, when he found only three families and two bachelors living in the little settlement.

“”The entire town consisted of half a dozen board and log cabins, with a little shed that housed a sawmill,” Glover wrote.

They stopped at the cabin of J.J. Downing and his wife, who fixed them lunch. Mrs. Downing invited them to spend the night in an unfinished log cabin on what is now Spokane Falls Boulevard, between Mill and Howard streets. Glover slept in his blankets on the dirt floor, “with the roar of the falls in my ears.”

The next day, he climbed out on a rock over the falls and “gave myself completely over to admiration and wonder at the beautiful clear stream that was pouring into the kettle and over the falls.”

“There were many more rocks in the river than there are now, of course,” he wrote. “When the Water Power company put in its dam and power house, it blasted a great many of them out of the way. I sat there, almost unconscious of anything but the river, gazing and wondering and admiring.”

From the execution beat: U.S. Treasury officials officially rejected the idea of using the downtown Spokane post office as a site for the hanging of convicted murderer Edward Mayberry.

The reason? “Humanitarian grounds.”

However, officials provided Spokane’s U.S. marshal no further guidance on where the hanging could take place. It apparently had to be on federal property, since Mayberry was being hung for a federal crime.