100 years ago in Spokane: The city hadn’t grown in a decade, and a railroad tycoon said promoting immigration was the answer

Spokane financier and railroad tycoon Jay P. Graves was asked what the city and state needed for its betterment in the coming year.

His answer? “Population. Secure population and more population.”

“Immigration has not been moving toward Washington for a number of years,” Graves said. “The trend has all been toward California. My idea is that this city has not advertised its resources, neither has she sought immigrants as she did in the years from 1890 to 1900.”

Graves was clearly concerned about the stagnation that had occurred in the population of both the city and the state over the last decade or more. The city’s population didn’t grow at all between 1910 and 1920.

The state’s 1920 census population was about 1.35 million. For some perspective on this, the state’s 2020 census showed 7.7 million.

From the court beat: A witness in the Maurice Codd subornation of perjury trial testified that he saw Codd’s brother hand $20 in cash to a witness in the Codd murder trial.

A defense attorney objected, saying the brother might have simply been paying back a bill.

In another testy exchange, defense attorneys attempted to insinuate that Carl and Lillian Bergland, who ran the Granite Hotel where the fatal fight took place, were actually running a house of prostitution.

This caused Carl Bergland to stand up in the witness stand and say angrily, “That is a lie.”

“Don’t you call me a liar,” the defense attorney said.

“You can’t say that about my place of business,” Bergland retorted.