Photo. by T. C. Elliott Site of "Spokane House," built in 1810 View looking West; Little Spokane river in foreground and Spokane River beyond selecting the site and erecting the first buildings at Spokane House, located on a beautiful and sheltered peninsula at the junction of the Spokane (then known as the Skeetshoo River) and the Little Spokane rivers, a spot where the Indians were accustomed to gather in large numbers to dry their fish. The location was nine or ten miles northwest of the present flourishing city of Spokane, which has succeeded it as a natural trade center and which today outranks Astoria in both population and commercial importance. Alex. Henry states in his journal that Spokane House was established in the summer of 1810. It was maintained as the principal distributing point in the interior by the North-West Company and later by the Hudson's Bay Company until the spring of 1826, but was then abandoned in favor of a new post at Kettle Falls (Fort Colvile) on the direct route of travel up and down the Columbia. The cellar holes of the buildings at Spokane House can still be indistinctly seen by those who know where to look for them. In 1812, a very short distance from these buildings, the Pacific Fur Company built a rival establishment, which was maintained until the dissolution of that company in the fall of 1813. There remain to be mentioned three other valid attempts to establish trade relations in the basin of the Columbia, the first of which may have antedated the building of Spokane House by a brief period. This was the enterprise of the Winships of Boston, who sailed into the river in the spring of 1810 and began to erect some buildings on the Oregon shore at Oak Point, about fifty miles from the sea. This attempt was abandoned almost immediately because of the sudden rise of the river with the melting of the snows inland; it was a matter of weeks only and possibly of days. The second was the temporary residence of Andrew Henry, of the Missouri Fur Company, during the winter months of 1810-11 on the upper waters of the Snake River, near the present town of St. Anthony, Idaho (compare with Lyman's Hist. of the Columbia River, page 109). The overland party of Astorians found his aandoned cabins upon their arrival in the early fall of 1811, and it was many years afterward before Fort Hall was built as a trading post in that general locality. The third was the only attempt of the Hudson's Bay Company to compete with their rival, the North-West Company, for the Indian trade west of the Rocky Mountains. Alexander Henry makes mention in his journal of the starting off of this expedition from Rocky Mountain House on the Saskatchewan in the summer of 1810, under the charge of Joseph Howse, and states that James McMillan was sent to follow and keep watch of them. David Thompson, when near the source of the Columbia in May, 1811, on his way from Canoe River to the Saleesh Country and beyond, met an Indian who told him that this Hudson's Bay Company party was already returning and was then at Flathead Lake. It is not positive where this party spent the winter, but in his "Fur Hunters of the Far West" (Vol. 2, p. 9), Alexander Ross places them on Jocko Creek in Missoula County, Montana, near where the town of Ravalli is now situated; while an early edition of the Arrowsmith map of British North America (which maps were dedicated to the Hudson's Bay Company, and purported to contain the latest information furnished by that company), shows their trading post at the head of Flathead Lake very near to where the city of Kalispell, Montana, now is. The editor of a prominent newspaper in Montana, upon reading of the establishment of Saleesh House by David Thompson in the year 1809, wrote that they were beginning to feel quite antiquated in Western Montana. Trade in the Kootenay District of British Columbia antedated the building of Astoria by three and a half years, and that in the Flathead Country of Montana by one and a half years, and that at Spokane, Washington, by at least six months. The cities that have become the commercial centers of these interior districts have not been built upon the exact sites of the early trading posts unless that may be said as to Spokane, Washington, but have all been built along the same established Indian trails or roads, and these have become the transcontinental railroads of today. Search for the existing records of these early enterprises and for physical remains of the early trading posts may be |