The Bolivar County Democrat

METROPOLIS
OF THE WILDS

Spokane, City of a Hundred and Fifty Thousand People, Has Good Trout Fishing Within Limits.

A city of a hundred and fifty thousand people that has good trout fishing within its city limits and Indians living in their tepees a mile and a half away is something that you cannot grasp unless you know the West. And even if you do, Spokane would strike you as something of a surprise. It looks as though it had been built yesterday in what was a virgin wilderness the day before - and yet made complete with street cars and electric lights and everything that you could find in a New England town, except, perhaps, the cultured atmosphere.

The Spokaneites do not miss the cultured atmosphere. If you asked about it they would probably tell you that they prefer the smell of the pines. For they are an outdoors-living crew. A citizen of Spokane may attend a board of directors' meeting in the heart of the city at 10 a. m. and at 4 p. m. he may be hunting bear. The mountains crowd right down upon the city and there are fifty lakes within a radius of a hundred miles.

Spokane, like Rome, was not built in a day, but it was set up at a rate that makes all of those old saws about how long it takes to do things look hollow and meaningless. It was only in 1858 that the Indians got their first decisive defeat in this region and the first locomotive arrived in a town started, but it was wiped out by fire that year.

The real growth began when the river was turned into electric power - 170,000 horse. From this giant dynamo electricity reaches out through the canyons to hundreds of mines, driving the power trams into the bowels of the mountains, bringing wealth to the city, which sits like a spider at the center of its mighty web of current.