Frontier paper brought back to life

OLYMPIA – In 1883, Spokane Falls was a town of Old Swan gin, cigars, land speculators and horse-drawn wagons churning up dust in the streets.

Into this boomtown arrived a California newspaperman, Frank M. Dallam. He ordered type from California, sent for presses and founded the fledgling city’s second newspaper: the Spokane Falls Review.

“It will be the endeavor of the publisher to make the Review so intensely local that it will become a necessity in every household,” Dallam declared in the inaugural edition. (The Spokesman-Review is a descendant of Dallam’s weekly.)

Now, anyone with a computer and an Internet link can peer back at life in Spokane 125 years ago. The Washington State Library, as part of a project to make historic newspapers accessible, has posted online editions from the paper’s 1883 launch through early 1886. The online papers are a tiny fraction of the state library’s thousands of reels of microfilmed state newspapers.

“That was the one resource that people kept asking for” to study local history and genealogy, said deputy state librarian Marlys Rudeen.

To help, volunteers and workers for the library have spent eye-straining months scanning and indexing the old text. It’s now easy to search online for articles mentioning specific people, places and events in territorial Spokane, Walla Walla and Olympia. The Web site is http://www.secstate.wa.gov/ history/newspapers.aspx.

“The Spokane paper almost completely ignored national and international news. It focused on the minutia of daily life in and around Spokane Falls,” said Deb Ross, a volunteer indexer in Olympia who spent months culling names and other detail from the old microfilm images that are now posted online.

“If somebody threw a tea party, every single person who attended the tea party would be listed. It could drive you crazy, but it really gives you a sense of what life was like.”

Like many frontier papers, the Review was a relentless civic booster. It touted the “inexhaustible forests of valuable pine,” water power, and the area’s vast grazing and crop lands. The city would be “a second Minneapolis,” Dallam vowed, and settlers “might travel seventeen million miles and not find a better place.”

When the Sprague Herald complained about the U.S. land office being moved to the growing city, the Review blasted away.

“Spokane Falls will be a great city without a halt,” Dallam wrote, “while your place will retain its present beautiful insignificance.”

Even the weather report got this treatment: “It is too hot in California, too cold in the east, and just about right in Washington Territory right now,” the paper reported.

The local news – who had measles, who was visiting family in Oregon, who’d arrived from Colville – was mixed with bare-bones news dispatches that often consisted of a single sentence. Opium smoking was increasing in New York. Federal troops and Apache Indians were battling in northern Mexico. One seven-word news story read simply “Tacoma is to be lit by gas.”

Among the local news given extensive treatment, on the other hand: a well-digger who unearthed an old 6-pound cannonball, and the grim case of Al Jones, a shopkeeper whose nose was nearly severed by an exploding bottle of seltzer.

“There were a lot of articles about barroom brawls and escapes from jail and things like that,” said Ross. When hopeful gold miners began surging into the hills of North Idaho, Dallam dispatched correspondents to cover nugget finds and life in the mining towns.

“It’s sort of the nuts and bolts of history,” said Rudeen. “This is where it got recorded and reacted to for the first time. It was the first look at where we were going.”

Sometimes, the going stalled. For weeks, Dallam’s paper carefully chronicled preparations for a celebration of the newly completed Northern Pacific rail route linking the coasts. The rail line was draped with evergreens. The town ran out of red, white and blue bunting to hang from buildings. Arches with inspiring mottos were built across the main streets. The railroad depot housed a massive display of local grains and vegetables. Flags fluttered as the Spokane Falls Cornet Band stood ready for a caravan of trains to arrive at 8 a.m. one Sunday. The dignitaries would tour the city, make speeches and celebrate until 11 p.m.

Then trains ran late. Maybe noon, the crowd was told.

“Our citizens clung on to hope, ready to enthuse at the proper moment,” Dallam wrote.

Then it was 4 p.m.

Then 7 p.m.

By the time the main crop of dignitaries arrived on the third train, the Spokane Falls citizens had lighted large bonfires to illuminate the tracks. Running late, none of the officials wanted to make speeches before the trains rushed on through the night. Many refused to emerge from their sleeping cars.

The city’s finery was shrouded in darkness. By the time the fifth train finally rolled through shortly before midnight, few people were left to cheer.

The subsequent headlines: “Plenty of Enthusiasm, but Nothing to Waste it On! Belated Trains. Tedious Waiting. Wholesale Disappointment.”

As with most newspapers, the news was sandwiched around ads.

“Whoa, Emma! We are here,” read one for a store advertising everything from groceries to varnish to dishes to ammunition.

In a town awash in land speculators, many ads touted frontier attorneys and real estate firms. While the young men of Cheney and Colfax played the newfangled game of “base ball,” locals joked, their peers in Spokane were furiously selling land at a 50 percent markup.

The paper also printed ads pitching patent medicines and toiletries. People could buy “Peruvian Bitters,” guaranteed to cure malaria, or Buckingham’s Dye for the Whiskers. The sick could turn to Dr. Mintie’s Dandelion Pills or the $1.50-a-bottle Sir Astley Cooper’s Vital Restorative, certain to fix lost memory, noises in the head, “lost manhood,” drunkenness and “aversion to society.” The balding could take hope in Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer.

The state library wants students to see the old newspapers, but warns teachers that some of the language reflects the prejudices of the times. Although there is some sympathetic coverage of local individual American Indians, Dallam’s paper also referred to tribes that “infest” the Northwest, and to “wholly savage” parts of Africa.

“I think they had mixed feelings,” said Ross, “but not to the extent that they were wronging the tribes by taking their land. That never even occurred to them.”

There are occasional mentions of Chinese railroad workers, yet in reading three years of the paper, Ross couldn’t find a single instance in which any of the Chinese men were referred to by name. Nonetheless, when Tacoma mobs force-marched that city’s entire Chinese population onto a train bound for Portland, the Review blasted Tacoma.

“They (teachers) need to use this as a teachable moment and talk about how attitudes have changed,” said Rudeen. “This is history uncensored.”