Creek Indian Artist Todd Harder Coming to Spokane

There is something of a cultural florescence happening in Native America these days, and some of the cultural mixing is surprising and even playful. Take for example the Creek artist Todd Harder and his amazing native-themed skateboard decks:

Harder is quite prolific--you can see more of his work here. A nationally-prominent figure, the New York Times ran a piece on Harder and the annual All Nations Skate Jam that he organized--an alcohol and drug-free gathering of Indian skateboarders that takes place in Albuquerque. Harder is also a central figure in the Smithsonian exhibit "Ramp it Up: Native Skateboard Culture in America."

Harder will speaking at Gonzaga on Thursday, September 18, at 5:00 p.m.  in the Globe Room of Cataldo Hall. A map of Gonzaga campus is here.The event is free and open to the public, and is sponsored by Gonzaga’s Native American Studies program and by the College of Arts and Sciences. For more information on this event, please contact Laurie Arnold, Director of Native American Studies, arnoldL@gonzaga.edu.

Nice Piece About James Glover in the Inlander

The Inlander is our mildly-alternative weekly here in Spokane. They run local history stories from time to time. Last week's cover story, Facing History  by Lisa Waananen Jones takes a hard look at the "Father of Spokane," James Glover, and the wife who he had committed to an insane asylum.

Behold my mustache, hipsters,
and despair!

I think that every western town has its Glover--the white male founding father who, despite having streets and parks and like named after him, does not bear close inspection.Our Glover was not actually the first person on the ground here in Spokane--not even the first white person. His 1873 settlement was proceeded in the proximate area by area by the Northwest Fur Company's Spokane House (founded in 1810), Tshimakain Mission (1838), Plante's Ferry (1852) and the bustling settlement of Moran Prairie which began in 1860 and had perhaps more than a dozen families when Glover arrived. Even on the very ground where Glover platted his Spokan Falls, there were two men and a sawmill. Glover would later tell everyone they had been horse thieves--though as historian Tony Bamonte says in Jones' article, they were not.

And yet a town must have a founder and he must be white and male and mustachioed and so James Glover is the Father of Spokane. To be fair, he did a lot for the community, relentlessly promoting it to settlers and to the Territorial government, all in the service of making himself wealthy. And he did strike it rich with the new town--at least until one of those pesky 19th-century financial panics stripped it all away.

Jones does a nice job in her article of poking around the seedier side of Glover--who had sharp elbows in business, abandoned a mentally ill wife and had her committed that he might remarry, and rewrote our early history to make himself the hero. He was also a key figure in the establishment of our city, like him or not. We will always have Glover.

Ghost Signs of Spokane, Part Two

EWU grad students Anna Harbine and Frank Oesterheld leading
a tour of the ghost signs of Spokane

Some time back I posted about a unique class project that I was forcing my unwilling students to do using to enrich my class on Local History Research Methods--the Ghost Sign Project. I thought I should bring the subject up-to-date.

Ghost signs are those faded, painted advertisements that you see on the sides of buildings in the historic areas of many American cities. Painted in thick layers of lead paint, many have long outlived the products and businesses they were created to advertise. In the spring of 2013, my students fanned out across Spokane and did an inventory of the surviving ghost signs.  I thought it would be fun to have my students map and record as many of the signs as they could find, then research the background of these vanished businesses.

The assignment worked better than I dared imagine. The students loved prowling the alleyways (always in pairs!) and finding the old signs. They became quite competitive, trying to see who could find the most. They took with them clipboard, cameras, and a form that we developed together to record their data. You can see the form here.

An online version of the form, created by my student Frank Oesterheld, automagically dropped their information into a Google Fusion Table. This generated a map of the ghost signs of Spokane:

Pretty cool, yes? We found signs for blacksmiths and buggy manufacturers, for early car dealerships and Single Room Occupancy hotels, for cigars and chewing tobacco, for paints and coffee and flour. All in all the signs, most created between 1890 and 1920, painted a picture of a workingman's town where people wanted an inexpensive place to stay and a cheap cigar.

Then we took to the archives to research the histories of the signs. City directories and Sanborn maps were the most valuable sources, but we also dug through Google News Archives, historic register nominations, census records, marriage and other vital records, and oral histories. I told my students to look for interesting stories behind the signs--stories of the business, stories of the owners, stories about the kind of town that Spokane was during the era in which their sign was painted. They found some great stuff, including Japanese hotel owners, the era of cheap downtown lodging, life in the rail yards, and Spokane's "cracker war." The stories were written from our local history smartphone app and website, Spokane Historical. The best of them appear there as a walking tour, Ghost Signs of Spokane.

It was a tremendously successful class exercise. And yet when class was over some of us felt like the topic was not exhausted. How else could this research be presented?

This spring two of my graduate students, Anna Harbine and Frank Oesterheld, developed a face-to-face walking tour of the signs that they would lead. Adapting the digital to the analog proved an interesting challenge. Which signs do we include? How far do we want to walk? Should the tour be one-way or a loop? Oesterheld and Harbine chose a route, developed scripts, and practiced the walk a half-dozen times. Last Friday they went live, leading a group from the Northwest Archivists Conference through the back alleys of Spokane in search of ghosts. It was a hit! Here are some pictures of the event, taken by Benjamin Helle of the Washington State Archives ~ Olympia Regional Branch. Here we are getting started:

Don't despair if you missed the tour, we are looking at ways to make it happen again, perhaps as part of a First Friday event.

As a teaching exercise in public history, I am delighted how this project has evolved. The class itself was part research seminar and part treasure hunt, both educational and engaging. They course laid the building blocks of a digital tour, and then a physical tour, also spearheaded by public history students. Four of the students in the course also presented their work as a poster session at the National Council for Public History conference this spring. The project built a lot of bridges with the local historic preservation community and most importantly brought attention to some of my students and their work.

I teach Research Methods in Local History again in the coming school year--what should we do as a group research project next time around?

A Postcard Valentine's Day Story

One of the challenges of the Spokane Historical project has been finding images that we can use. Digital history is hungry for pictures, and unfortunately the institutions which hold historic images in Spokane are hungry for cash. Three is no budget for Spokane Historical, it is a labor of love from the EWU Public History Program. So I have not been able to use many historic photographs from our local museum or newspaper.

Historians, though, are nothing if not resourceful. We have found thousands of images we could use  by scouring other, copyright-free sources, including public archives like the Library of Congress and the Washington State Archives, old images in newspapers and Google books, and hundreds of historic postcards that I have purchased at thrift stores and online. Last year I bought this accordion-style postcard set of colorized images of Spokane from the 1930s and 40s:

Looking more closely, I discovered I had purchased more than I'd bargained for. I always consider it a bonus when someone has written on the postcards. Over the years I have found love notes, parental chastisements, and travel stories this way. This particular set of postcards was addressed to Gazel (yes, Gazel) Turner of Philippi, West Virginia. The postmark is October 17, 1945:

Here is Gazel in the 1940 census--daughter of Issac and Dessie. Apparently unusual female names were a Turner family tradition. She was 21, single, and like nearly everyone else in Philippi, had gone to school only through the 8th grade. What really caught my eye though was the note written around the return address inside:

Can you make it out? It reads: "With lots of love to the girl of my dreams I hope." I love how "hope" is underlined. Of course I immediately went online to the Washington State Archives, Digital Archives to see what happened with Miss Turner and her hopeful suitor. Here is what I found:

Reader, he married her. On the day before Christmas in 1946, eleven months after Milton dropped the post cards with his shyly-penciled love note into the mail. he and Gazel were wed. A Unitarian minister, the Rev. John Brogden, performed the service. I don't know when Gazel came out to Spokane or what she brought with her--but she must have brought our postcards, which she poured over again and again on her way across the country.

And that really is the end of story, because after their marriage in 1946, our lovebirds seem to have vanished. I can find no record of either Milton or Gazel, including no obituaries. And really, how does a person named Gazel hide from Google Search? One can speculate all sorts of scenarios, but I like to think they are still together, in their nineties, and living in a little shotgun house in Peaceful Valley, below the falls pictured in the postcard that Milton sent to his girl in 1945.

Two Spokane Street Scenes

I was digging around at the American Memory site at the Library of Congress today, looking for Spokane-related images. There is a lot to explore, including perhaps hundreds of images of American Indians in and around Spokane at different eras. One of my favorite images (and one of the earliest) is this 1879 street scene:

Spokane people lined up to receive food in front of Loenberg's Store,
Spokane, Washington, 1887

There is a lot to love about this image. This is very early in Spokane history. so it is a fairly rare image of Spokane in its frontier stage. I love how the Indian men and women are unposed--going about their daily lives in their regular clothes, very different from the staged photographs of Indians so commonly produced by white photographers for white audiences. I love the questions the image provokes--When did the Indian Agents dispense rations in Spokane, and when did this stop? Are any of the individuals identifiable? Why was this photograph made in the first place? Who is R. D. Gwydir?--I have seen the name of this Indian Agent before and I think one could assemble a decent biography. (Update: Check out this brief biography at Wikipedia--what an interesting character!)  And then there is the dog!

The other thing I love is the simple fact that there is an exact location provided: "Lomberg's store, Southeast corner of Howard Street and Front Avenue." So often the location of historic photographs is a matter of guesswork, and my work with Spokane Historical has made me acutely aware of the value of precise locations. Front Avenue was renamed Spokane Falls Boulevard for Expo '74.

A fun thing to when you do have an exact location for a historic photograph is to go into Google Street View and see what the scene looks like today:

Boo Radley's! A fun little local shop with funky gifts--my teenaged son loves the place, as do I. The building in the 1879 photo is long gone, of course, probably burned in the fire ten years later. I will think of that photograph every time I walk past this corner. 

Will the 40th Anniversary of Expo 74 Pass Unnoticed?

One of my favorite stories about Spokane involves a friend in Missouri and the film Smoke Signals. This wonderful movie, about two Spokane Indians on a road trip, features some scenes shot in our city. When I lived in Missouri I lent it out to a friend. Afterwards I asked what he thought. 

"It was pretty good," he said, "except for that one ridiculous scene. You know, the one that makes it look like there is this huge waterfall right in downtown Spokane."

The falls have been there for centuries, but the ability to view them was lost for several generations of Spokanites. What brought the river back into view was arguably the most significant event to happen to Spokane in the late 20th century: Expo '74, Spokane's worlds fair. The above news report from a local station gives a nice overview of the way the fair remade the city. A polluted river, hemmed in by railroad tracks and hobos, was cleaned up and revealed. When the fair was over we were left with a magnificent urban park. It was a great victory of civic planning and visionary leadership. And it happened 40 years ago.

So what are we doing to celebrate? So far as I know, nothing. Our local history museum is busy building what looks to an ambitious new exhibit, but Expo 74 is just one of their 100 stories. I am not aware of any other commemorations planned.

We have the resources to do more. My colleague Bill Youngs wrote the book on Expo 74 (and a great book it is). There are some great photographs of Expo. Many, many residents have fond memories of the fair. We have a number of Expo 74 items on Spokane Historical, the smart phone app for local history. There is so much local pride, still, in the fact that we are the smallest city ever to host a world's fair. Heck, Expo even gets a shout out in our unofficial anthem Spokane Song by the band Trailer Park Girls:

          We once had an Expo / 
          I think it is time we got over it.

Does anyone know of any commemorations or celebrations of Expo 74 that are in the works? Anyone want to put something together?

Original Expo 74 Sky Ride car on Display at Riverfront Square

Propose a Session for the NW Archivists Conference in Spokane

The Northwest Archivists are "a regional association of professional archivists, users of archives, and others interested in the preservation and use of archival materials in the Pacific Northwest United States, including Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington." Their annual conference moves around the Northwest and next spring is is going to be in Spokane. Here is the Call for Session Proposals, with a nifty online submission process. The theme this year will be "Moving Forward: Reaching New Audiences with the Past."

Submission Deadline: Friday, January 17, 2014 

Notification of Acceptance: Mid-February, 2014 

 Northwest Archivists is holding its annual meeting in beautiful Spokane, Washington, May 29-May 31, 2014 at the Davenport Hotel. We are excited to discuss new and innovative ways of reaching new audiences with the past using our archival collections! We're keeping our theme broad in an effort to invite a wide range of presentation topics. 

Here are some topic suggestions: 

• Providing archival education and instruction to students, older adults, local communities, etc. 
• Curating exhibits to engage a changing audience 
• Implementing outreach activities and events for local communities 
• Developing and using new tools (or old tools in innovative ways) to provide access to collections 
• Connecting and collaborating with Native American and Alaska Native groups through archives 
• Using social media to connect users to collections 
• Refining or expanding collection development policies and strategies to provide archival audiences with new sources of information 
• Developing and implementing marketing and branding strategies 

And, of course, feel free to brainstorm your own ideas and submit your proposal(s)! Questions? Contact Natalia Fernández, Program Committee Chair, natalia.fernandez@oregonstate.edu

Misquoting Jesus in Spokane

Big local event coming up! EWU and the Daniel and Margaret Carper Foundation are bringing Bart Ehrman to town to give a history talk: Misquoting Jesus:Discrepancies in Christian scripture. Ehrman teaches Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is the author of 20 books about the Bible, and is one of the top New Testament scholars in the world. He is a big deal, and a very engaging and witty speaker. YouTube is full of the guy.

The event is at 6:30 p.m., Thursday, May 23, 2013 at the Martin Woldson Theater at The Fox, Downtown Spokane, Wash.. And it is free! See you there.

Olmsted Online

Well, look at what a pretty thing this is!

Olmstead Online is an archive of plans and projects of the Olmstead firm across the United States. The Olmsteads were the most prominent landscape design firm of the late-19th and early-20th century America. The project is in its initial phase and the only state with a rich set of content is Washington. A FAQ page tells visitos that "received a grant from the federal Transportation Enhancement Program with a pilot to digitize plans and maps of the Olmsted-designed landscapes in Washington State." Lucky us! The interactive map of Washington State shows that most of the firm's work was Spokane or the Puget Sound region, with a scattering of projects in other corners of the state:

Zooming in on individual sites reveals shows us what is under the hood at Olmstead Online. The data set for Cannon Hill Park, an Olmstead park a few blocks from my house, lists 13 files including contour maps and sketches for buildings--but the only files online as yet are two planting plans. They are pretty neat:

Most of the Washington Olmstead sites are like this--a couple of interesting images but far more intriguing image descriptions that have not yet been uploaded. The site reminds us that for all of the Olmstead's fame as park builders, a huge amount of their firm's business was landscaping the grounds of private residences. Look at the details on this preliminary grounds plan for the mansion of H. W. Cowles in Browne's Addition:

This is a project in the early stages and the gaps are quite visible. Some of the locations on the map contain no images at all. Search features are wonky. The non-interactive timeline add little to the site. And there is very little information about the project itself. How did they choose which images to put online? Are more images on the way or is this it? What about the other states? Still, Olmstead Online is a compelling resource.

Spokane Historical's Guide to Dropping Out of the Bloomsday Race

Bloomsday, Spokane's annual 12k run, is this Sunday. About 40,000 close friends will converge on Spokane to race on a beautiful course that will include such Spokane wonders as Riverfront Park, views of the falls, the Peaceful Valley neighborhood, and Riverside State Park. And along the way they will pass a lot of important historical sites.

If you are one of the thousands of people who walks the route instead of running, I have a suggestion. Take your smartphone, download the Spokane Historical Smartphone app, and turn your water breaks into learning opportunities. Better yet, abandon the race and just explore the history of Spokane. Here is some of what you will discover:

Starting Line: You and your 40,000 friends are going to spend a while waiting for the race to begin, and fortunately Riverside is one of Spokane's more historic streets. Take a few minutes with Spokane Historical to learn about the Great Spokane Fire of 1889 and landmarks like the Davenport Hotel and the Great Western Building.

Mile 1: Still on Riverside Avenue, you are now skirting the edge of the historic Browne's Addition neighborhood. Look up at the MAC (the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture for you out-of-towners). Consider dropping out of the race in favor of a more genteel walking tour of Browne's Addition. Or stop at the Elk for a Bloody Mary. You don't have to run.

Mile 2: Having ignored my suggestion to drop out a mile back, you are now puffing up a hill above People's Park--which served as a special campground for hippies and the like during Expo 74. This was the only time that hippies were welcome in Spokane.

Mile 3: Now you are running past Greenwood Cemetery, a classic Victorian burial ground. Get off the rat race and explore this magical place with Spokane Historical. Learn about Spokane Garry, Spokane's Civil War Veterans, Mary Latham, and the mysterious hidden tunnel.

Mile 4: To your left is Fort George Wright. This historic site was home to black soldiers, and a totem pole. In 1911 Teddy Roosevelt gave a speech here--listen to a recording.

Mile 5: As you huff up Doomsday Hill, look out to where Natatorium Park used to be. Don't you wish you were there now?

Mile 6: The West Central neighborhood is Spokane's poorest neighborhood, but also the site of some spectacular mansions such as the Glover House and the Richardson House.

Mile 7: It is never too late to quit! Check out the historic Spokane Courthouse. Or continue across the iconic Monroe Street Bridge. Learn what the falls meant to the Spokane Indians and read Sherman Alexie's wonder poem and art project That Place Where Ghosts of Salmon Jump.

Did you finish the race? Very well then--but spend some time walking around the downtown with Spokane Historical. We have over 250 Spokane stories online and on your smartphone!

Mullan Road Conference Next Weekend!

Dear Readers, I have been remiss in informing you about the upcoming Mullan Road Conference, which is this weekend in Spokane and Cheney.

Named after its builder Captain John Mullan, the road crossed the Continental Divide to connect the headwaters of navigation on the Missouri and Columbia Rivers. The wagon road was begun in 1859 and completed in 1862. In a very real sense, the Mullan Road completed the work begun by Lewis and Clark as they searched for a practical route to the Pacific Ocean.

Also much like Lewis and Clark, the Mullan Road is a bit overrated. The road only served for a few years before being closed by winter avalanches and washouts. Parts of the road continued to be used, right to this day, but long stretches are all but forgotten. Though the Mullan Road has a fascinating history it is hardly the equivalent of the Oregon Trail or other great western roads.

Still, the road attracts continuing interest from a mixed community of academics and history buffs. Each year we get together at a site along the road to share our research, look at pictures of ruts, see the local historical sites, and on Sunday to explore a section of the road--when it can be located at all. This year the conference will be held at the MAC, where we will break our sessions with a tour of the excellent David Douglas exhibit. And on Sunday we will explore the trail from the Snake River to the Idaho line.

Registration is a bargain at $60, or $20 without the meals! Come join us.

Spokane Ghost Signs Update



Surely not *that* Henry George?

Today ended the second week of History 407: Research Methods in Local History. What a great day we had! The course met at the old Schade Brewery building in the West Central neighborhood, near Riverpoint campus. We explored the lobby and the historic photograhs there, then headed over to the Jensen Byrd. Students worked in teams of two, one with a clipboard and the other with a camera to record the signs the we found. Then the teams fanned out and explored the neighborhood.

Afterwards we had some beers at Ugly Betties and talked about what we had found and how to improve our data collection. Some of the observations:

• An amazing number of legible signs still exist, and they are cool as hell
• There are also many traces of signs that are no longer readable--we will look for historic photos to try and figure out what they said
• Photographing the signs is tricky, some are up high and at angles where they are not visible directly below, other are obscured by power lines and the like
• Signs for hotels and tobacco produces predominated with about five of each
• Working in teams is definitely the right way to proceed, not only so one can take pictures and the other notes but also to help one another deciper faded lettering
• We cannot wait to get into the archives and begine researching the stories behind the signs, which we will find in city directories, property record cards, register nominations, and more

Below is a slideshow of some pictures I took. The first half are from a few weeks ago when I was scouting for this class, today's photographs begin with the Schade brewery.

 

Inlander Video on the History of Liberty Park

The Inlander is our local alternative weekly, and lately they have been producing local history videos. Below is the latest installment, featuring recent EWU public history grad Tracy Rebstock. Last year Rebstock researched the history of Spokane's parks for a series of stops for Spokane Historical. It is nice to see her hard-earned expertise in the subject being recognized in this video:

Mapping Spokane's Dead: A Pedagogical Experiment in Flash-mob Data Visualization

I taught Digital History last quarter. The course was a lot of fun as a dozen traditionally-trained MA students and I explored some of the new digital historical landscapes. The class is divided between readings discussions and a weekly "make" where we bust open some new digital tool and see what we can do with it. For our weekly make a few months ago we created, populated, and visualized a historical database in about an hour. This post is about what we did and how we did it.

I had a couple of different pedagogical goals.First, I wanted my students to understand the importance and power of constructing a database, rather than merely building a website. Second, I wanted them to explore one tool for doing so, Google Fusion Tables. Third,.I wanted to use some of the rich historical resources of my employer, the Washington State Archives, Digital Archives. Finally I wanted them to experience the difficulty, decisions and compromises of building a database and extracting metadata from handwritten historical documents.

Working with my grad student, the excellent Lee Nilsson, we chose the Spokane County Death Returns.1888-1907 as our data set. These records were interesting, the images of the death certificates and some metadata were already online, they represented a broad cross-section of the population of early Spokane, and they presented certain complications as well, in terms of handwriting and uneven data. Here is a sample death return from the collection, that of the unfortunate Owen J. Jones:

When the State Archives originally scanned and indexed these records, they chose to record as the metadata the first and last names, age at death, and place of death. This was a good start, but missed some data that was recorded on the death certificates and that historians would find important. So we added race, occupation, place of birth and cause of death to the metadata fields that we wanted to capture.

Then Nilsson created a Google Fusion table with our metadata fields and entered the information from a few death returns. Right away he realized that one problem the students would run into was transcribing the causes of death--things like phthisis (tuberculosis of the lungs) and morasumus (malnutrition) written in sometimes terrible 19th-century handwriting. A quick Google found us some lists of 19th century causes of death. Nilsson added about 150 names from the 1880 death index to the Google Fusion table and used color highlighting to organize the list in groups of ten names. I took the email addresses of the students in the class and gave them permission to edit the table.

The actual lesson took about an hour. We gave each student ten names and asked them to read the death certificates and to add the metadata to the table. Nilsson and I circulated in the classroom to help people out.   The names and dates went pretty smoothly. The students stumbled with causes of death at first, but the guides to 19th century causes of death cleared up most questions. A bigger problem was missing data. 1880 was the first year of death records in Spokane and the record keeping was erratic. Places of birth, causes of death, and other items were not always filled out.

Then came the experiment part--visualizing the data. My original inspiration for the project was the idea that we would produce a map of where in Spokane people had died. This did not work so well:



In retrospect the reasons are clear. A few of the death certificates gave street addresses, and Google was able to map these accurately. In other cases no place was given, or given only as Spokane. In some cases there was a location but the student transcribing was unable to read it or just did not bother. With better instruction and monitoring this map might have come out better.

Much more satisfying was this map of where the people were born. It nicely illustrates patterns of migration into 19th century Spokane. Don't miss the guy from China!

Google Fusion tables allow for other types of visualization as well. Here is a pie graph of causes of death:



Those are some mighty thin slices of pie! The chart does not tell us very much, except that typhoid and pneumonia were common. We would have been better off creating categories--contagious disease, accidents, infant death, etc.

You can also make bar graphs--here is one for the occupations of the deceased. The laboring classes seem to have had it bad in early Spokane, though you would need some demographic analysis to make any conclusions here:


Finally, here is the a frequency showing the distribution of deaths throughout the year. The table is interactive, you can click and drag to explore it. Notice anything odd? The Grim Reaper seems to have forgotten Spokane entirely some months:



The students were quite puzzled by this and came up with all sorts of reasons that several months could have passed without a death. Of course the most likely explanation is simply that the records for those months have gotten lost in the century since they were initially recorded.

All in all this pedagogical experiment was a great success. My students learned how digital sausage is made--the decisions that go into choosing what metadata to record and visualize, the challenges of working with hand-written 19th-century documents, the amount of pain-staking work that went into a data visualization.

Mossback on Why Spokane is Central

You cannot do much blogging about Washington State history without coming across the wonderful work of Knute Berger--or "Mossback" as he would prefer. Berger has been blogging and writing about Pacific Northwest history for years. His focus is usually on Seattle and the Puget Sound, but sometimes he takes a broader view as with his "Heritage Turkey Awards."

Knute Berger. Image courtesy Evergreen State College.

I had the pleasure of finally getting to meet Berger in person at the National Trust Conference in Spokane last fall. He was clearly and openly taken with our city--an unusual response from a west-sider. (I maintain that they are all secretly impressed with Spokane and would move here in a minute but for fear of the mocking from their hipster friends.)

Anyway, Berger went back home and wrote a great piece: Preserving state's heritage: Why Spokane is Central. Here is a portion:

Spokane recently played host to the prestigious National Preservation Conference, put on by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Heritage advocates from all across the country, including the storm battered East Coast, made their way to the capitol of the Inland Empire. It was a chance for Spokane to show off its preservation efforts and architectural legacy, which has been key to revitalizing its downtown.

Go and enjoy the whole piece, a powerful argument for the importance of historic preservation in reviving American cites, with Spokane as exhibit #1.

Spokane's Fantastic Baby Cage

Spokane is proud of its inventors, such as Royal Riblet of the square-wheeled tractor fame and Mary Latham who invented a pessary (and did a lot of other stuff). And yet who among has heard of Emma Read?  I had not, until a great piece by Shawn Vestal in the Spokesman-Review introduced me to this Spokanite's earth-shaking invention. Behold, the baby cage--click for the video:

"How did this not catch on?" Vestal asks, "If you don’t read those words – Baby Cage – with a secret thrill, with an unspoken recognition that deep in the unexplored reaches of your mind, you always knew that cages were perfect for babies, then I suspect you’re not a parent."

What got me blogging about this topic was Vestal's frustration in trying to find out more about the inventor: "Read herself, as well as any level of detail about the creation of the cage, remains stubbornly elusive. There is no file on her in the newspaper’s archives. She is not mentioned in city histories that I could find. Google her, and you are reminded of two things: Google is not omniscient and about 80 percent of the online world is a vast cavern of echoes."

I took that as a challenge--afer all, digging up obscure Northwest History in the digital realm is the purpose of this blog. So what did I find? Not vey much, in truth, but I did come up with a few gems.

First, the newsreel report embedded above, from 1953. The views of a smoggy, gritty post-war London are as interesting as the cage itself. (Mother, that is not fresh air!) And then there is the original 1922 patent, to which Vestal alludes in his article. The patent is signed by Read, and also by a Watson E. Coleman, who turns out to have been a D.C. patent attorney who advertised his services in western periodicals of the time. From the patent we get the justification for the device:

Be it known that I, Emma Read, a citizen of the United States, residing at Spokane, in the county of Spokane and State of Washington, have invented certain new and useful Improvements in Portable Baby Cages, of which the following is a specification, reference being had to the accompanying drawings:

When baby gets too big you can also raise urban chickens! Read further explains the utility of her invention:

It is well known that a great many dificulties rise in raising and properly housing babies and small children in crowded cities, that is to say from the health viewpoint. This is especially true with reference to babies and young children, who at present are being raised in large apartments... In crowded cities, where the houses are closely arranged, and in large apartments, there is no way for proper ventilation ... to permit the children and babies to receive proper fresh air from outside.

This emphasis on the importance of fresh air was a common argument made by progressives during this time period. I comes in part from the still-believed miasma theory, which held that many contagious diseases were caused by "bad air." Belief in miasma theory was a major impetus to the city parks movement of the late-19th century. But I am getting all professor on you.

There are also a lot of great images out there of baby cages--which never seem to have been widely used, but were always photogaphed on the few occasions they did appear!

You laugh, but this child grew up to be Superman!

What of Vestal's challenge to discover more about the Spokane connections of the fabulous baby cage? Ancestry.com has an Emma K. Read of Spokane who might be our woman. If so, she at some point moved to Seattle where she died in 1956. And that--is about it. I can find no mention of Read in the digitized newspapers for early Spokane--though the common surname of Read, along with the fact that it is also a common verb ("to read a book"), makes for a messy search. There are a lot of men named Read in early Spokane, some of whom may have been relations. I don't find a birth or marriage certificate for Emma Reed at the Washington State Archives--and we would have them if they existed. She appears to have had no other patents. I could buy a subscription to Ancestry.com and view census records and the like and come up with further information, but I am cheap.

The cold digital trail for Emma Read makes two points. One is how little historical record most people leave, even the inventor of the baby cage. The other is that you cannot do all of your reseach online. My wife was quick to point out that you could find a lot more about Read with a trip to the Northwest Room of the Spokane Public Library or the MAC. A search through old city directories will reveal when and where Read lived in Spokane, her marital status, her occupation, and who else lived in the building. (See this entry for Etta Read as an example.) Only a few years of the directories for Spokane are digitized. From there one could go to Sanborn Maps, which have richly detailed illustrations of each city block. Did Read live in a downtown apartment? And did she have a baby? And with names of relatives and dates and such, one could look for ancestors, who might have more information.

Some of my readers have proven much smarter than I am. Can anyone find more information about Emma Read?

John Muir Biographer Coming to Aunties

This just in from Auntie's Bookstore:

You are cordially invited to a free author presentation, Q&A and book signing by James B. Hunt, professor emeritus at Whitworth University on Saturday, Jan. 12, 2:00 pm at Auntie's Bookstore 402 W. Main, Spokane WA. Before he achieved fame as an environmentalist, John Muir lost his sight in one eye, left his job as a machinist and walked across the South after the Civil War. Join us to learn more as Hunt presents his book, Restless Fires: John Muir's Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf in 1867-68.

Muir's 1867 walk to Florida was an turning point in the life of America's great naturalist, and the subject of Muir's book A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf. It is also an interesting episdoe in Muir's life in that it took place jsut two years after the end of the Civil War, and Muir trod across a South that was in many ways barely recovered from the conflict. (Muir himself had fled to Canada to avoid service during the war.)

Muir's walk can also be explored as a digital project. Here is a Google Earth file that includes a map of his route. And here is a short video of an exhibit in Oakland that overlays some of Muir's California drawings with Google Earth. And of course the Sierra Club has an extensive set of resources about Muir.

Come out and support our independent bookstore on the 12th!

So What is Happening with Spokane Historical?

Come and explore Spokane Historical!

Spokane Historical is a smartphone app and website for local history, and is a project of the Public History program at Eastern Washington University. It has been awhile since I blogged about this project, and there is a lot to report.

There are now over 150 high quality points of interpretation, or "tour stops" on Spokane Historical. All were created by EWU students in public history courses. I have given students a pretty free hand in choosing their topics, and I am pleased with the diversity of topics. In Spokane we have everything from a tour of the historic parks and Fort George Wright to stops along the Art Walk and many historic buildings and events.

Spokane Historical also includes substantial content in Cheney, including downtown landmarks such as the Odd Fellows Building and Bill's Tavern. We have interpreted over a dozen sites on the EWU campus, including Showalter Hall, the JFK Library, and Jore School--the one-room schoolhouse on the Cheney campus.

There is so much terrific content on Spokane Historical that for the next few weeks I will feature a series of posts about the project. But you don't have to wait for me--go ahead and take a look around.

Where Would You Film a Spokane Tilt-Shift Video?

You know those tilt-shift, time-lapse videos your friends are always sharing on Facebook? Neat, aren't they? I particularly like this one, filmed in Chicago:



What I love about it, beyond the technique, is how many iconic Chicago landmarks make an appearance. We see Navy Pier, Lakeshore Drive, the L, amd lots of Chicago architecture.

If you were going to make a film like this in Spokane, where would you film it? What places have both iconic imagery that says Spokane, but also some sort of interesting activity and movement that lends itself to this sort of film technique? Off the top of my head, a tilt-shift, time-lapse video of Spokane could include:

• people walking on the footbridge over the upper falls
• the gondolas over the lower falls
• the parking lot at SFCC filling up and emptying out
• kids sledding at Manito Park
• cars skidding on the snow on the South Hill
• trains passing through town, and over Latah Creek
• kayakers at People's Park
• folks crossing the bridge at Bowl and Pitcher
• downtown pedestrian and automobile traffic
• the rides at Riverfront Park
• sunset over Spokane from Palisades Park
• cars going around the curves on the Mount Spokane Road
• cars passing through an espresso stand

What else? And who is to make this film? It sounds like a good class project for some film class at one of the colleges. Get busy, someone!

Spokane Valley, 1857

So I was fooling around at the National Archives website the other day and found this:

Isn't it lovely? This watercolor was painted around 1857 near Plante's Ferry across the Spokane River, and is surely the earliest depiction of Spokane Valley. If you click through to the original record you can zoom in and explore this very detailed painting. Can you find the two men in a canoe? The wagon road?

The image reveals a lot about the environment at that time. I tweeted the image and the helpful @doigSt identified the mountains: "Signal Point, Blossom Mountain & the 2 Mica Peaks." He also asked why there are so few trees in the image. The almost complete lack of trees in the valley would have been due to native burning. Plateau Indians typically set periodic fires to many areas to shape the land to their needs. Regular burning created a purposeful mosaic of prairies and forest that created environments rich in game animals and popular plant foodstuffs.

I believe the painter must have been part way up the same bluff where Spokane inventor Royal Riblet built his mansion. Riblet is a great local character, the inventor of the chair lift and many other, often less practical, inventions. Perhaps I will head out with my camera and see if I can rephotograph the same area from the same location. In the meantime, here is the approximate same view in Google Earth: