6A | The county chronicles of 1910–1919
THE VOICE OF PEND OREILLE COUNT Y SINCE 1901
A Monthly Publication of The Miner Celebrating 100 years of Pend Oreille County
Rough and tumble Pend Oreille violent. Prohibition didn’t take effect in Washington until 1916 (lasting what must have been an agonizing 17 years), By Janelle Atyeo but controlling alcohol sales Of The Miner was one of the law’s major tasks. Women and “lewd hinking of life in early persons” were prohibited from loitering at the saloons. Pend Oreille County, One Chinese immigrant, it’s not a stretch to Sam Lee, was suspected of selling liquor without a imagine settlers toiling away license, an article in The to raise a crop and feed their Miner said. The law set up families, or loggers with crude a sting, sending in a couple of hoboes to order a round. equipment bucking away in That was at the City Cafe, not the dense woods. to be confused with the City The 1910s weren’t easy. Bar, which advertised on the But knife fights? Poisoning? same page of The Miner that Public officials ducking for it had a selection of fine beers: cover from a hail of gunfire at Gilt Top (brewed in Spokane), a local train station? Schlitz, Budweiser, Olympia, The first Pend Oreille and Pabst Blue Ribbon in residents went through some pints and quarts. trying times. Along with that People from all over the “unneighborly” conduct, the U.S. and other countries people of early Pend Oreille were settling in northeast County had plenty of other Washington in the early 1900s. hazards to watch for. The area When neighbors bickered, had in 1910 experienced one they preferred to take of the largest forest fires in matters into their own hands. recorded history. Structure Several murders resulted fires weren’t uncommon. A in the early days. A mining mid-night blaze that started in man in Metaline Falls was the back of T.J. Kelly’s general poisoned with strychnine in store (located at the present his coffee after an altercation Club Energy building) burned with a nearby homesteader. so hot that it turned the butter Neighbors at on the store’s front Blueslide and As the newly established shelves to creamy Ruby were Pend Oreille County puddles on the quarreling floor. In 1914, a fire began to grow and in what was on Newport’s Union expand, it was called the Avenue leveled “Kentucky constantly defending three buildings, Feud,” named itself and its worth to two residences and after the the state’s larger cities. outbuildings within state many an hour. of them had The Calispell moved from. An ambush at Valley flooded annually the Blueslide train station where there were no dams on happened in 1915. Shots the river. Logging accidents were meant for the county’s were frequent. Businesses, prosecuting attorney, and the particularly hardware stores, suspect wasn’t captured for were victim to burglars, and nearly two years. bandits still held up the trains Even the founding fathers now and then. weren’t always on their best Another inconvenience behavior. Joe Cusick, who was disease. Small pox was founded the mid-county town, spreading, and many people shot and killed a former failed to seek a doctor for employee of his who did him help because they couldn’t wrong. It took two trials to be bothered with being convict him, but he went to quarantined. Several articles prison, serving four years in the newspaper urged people before the governor gave him a to take caution and keep the pardon. Still, he didn’t return illness from spreading. The to Cusick. He lived out his flu epidemic hit the area in days in California. 1918. The county’s first homicide That’s not to say that occurred when a man at Lost the people of Pend Oreille Creek came home drunk and County didn’t have their took to beating his wife and fun. Baseball was big, kids. As they ran away, he as were evening dances, followed them, but not before summertime picnics and getting in a tussle with the Chautauqua get-togethers. neighbor and threatening him Fid’s Opera House opened with a knife. The neighbor in Newport in December fired four shots, leaving the 1911, bringing live shows notoriously bad man dead on and the latest movies. his cabin floor. Admission was 10 cents. Alcohol was often the It was also the site of local incendiary factor when club meetings and high confrontations between school graduations. The neighbors and partners turned
The 1910s weren’t a walk along the Pend Oreille
T
structure, built with cement from the newly opened Inland Portland Company in Metaline Falls, is around today as the apartments on Fourth Street behind Owen’s Grocery. A local chapter of the Moose
Lodge formed in 1912, and they brought entertainment to town, starting with a public “smoker” at Kelly’s Hall where a 45-year-old professional wrestler from Sandpoint took on five Newport men in an
hour. Idaho had the brawn and the beauty. Priest Lake was a popular summertime destination for local folks. To get there, though, they had to take a ferry across the Pend Oreille.
The service was frequently stalled when the ferry was water logged or out of commission for some other reason. That’s when Miner
SEE CENTENNIAL, 9A
COURTESY PHOTO|PEND OREILLE COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY MUSEUM
Fid’s Bar was a popular watering hole in early day Newport. It operated on Union Avenue in a building that is no longer standing. Fid’s Opera House, built in 1911, brought live shows and movies to Newport. It survives today as the apartments behind Owen’s Grocery.
FILE PHOTO
A Kalispel Indian mother poses with her baby at Cusick in 1911. In those days, the tribe numbered fewer than 100 members and suffered from foreign disease brought by white settlers.
COURTESY PHOTO|PEND OREILLE COUNTY HISTORICAL MUSEUM
Smokes all around in Locke. This photo from the Ralph R. Isaacs album is one of several showing the pipe-smoking dog. Pictured here is possibly Isaacs and his son-in-law on the porch of the Isaacs cabin at Locke.
In January 1913, downtown Newport was buried in snow. Here, looking south from what is now Third and Washington, businesses include Empire Laundry, on the east with J. A. Noble grocery, Ben Jacin Taylor, Pederson shoes, City Bar, Heisner Hotel, City Cafe restaurant, unidentified restaurant, unidentified business, Dray & Transfer, Tulles pharmacy, Great Northern depot and Moeser Lumber (behind depot). On the west side are: Judd’s Drug Store and Northern Hotel. The banner reads in part, “Moose Minstrel, Jan. 31st-Feb. 1st – Opera House.” This picture was made by the local photographer, Wintemute.
COURTESY PHOTO|PEND OREILLE COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY
The 1910s at a glance
1910
• U.S. population is 92 million • Life expectancy is 48 for a male and 51 for a female • The average salary is $750 per year • Milk was 32 cents per gallon • Whiskey was $3.50 per gallon
1913
• Woodrow Wilson proceeds William Howard Taft as president • Income tax established in 16th amendment • Henry Ford creates the assembly line
• Boy Scouts Established • Washington women get to vote Nov. 8 • The Great Fire roars through north Idaho, Montana and Washington, Aug. 20-21
1911
• Standard Oil Company broken up • Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Catches Fire in New York City
1912
• Titanic sinks • “Oliver Twist” is first U.S. feature film • Summer Olympics held in Stockholm
Centennial Events SATURDAY, MARCH 19 Tundra Swan Festival: Camas Center for Community Wellness Too Slim and the Taildraggers: 7:30 p.m. - Cutter Theatre
MARCH 28 AND 29
1914
• Archduke Ferdinand assassinated • Charlie Chaplin debuts as the Little Tramp • Panama Canal completed • World War I begins in Europe
1916
• Washington state prohibition takes effect • U.S. acquires Virgin Islands • Easter Rising leads to independence of Ireland
1917
• Russian Revolution • U.S. Enters World War I, April 6
1918
• Spanish flu pandemic • Russian Czar Nicholas II and family are killed
‘Medea’ By Euripides: 7:30 p.m. - Cutter Theatre
1919
• Treaty of Versailles ends World War I • Eighteenth amendment on prohibition passed
For more centennial information, contact planning committee chairman Bruce Taylor at 509-4474690 or pendoreillecentennial@yahoo.com.
CENTENNIAL | The 1910s weren’t easy FROM PAGE 6A
publisher Fred Wolf took up the cause of building a bridge across the river at Newport. It wouldn’t happen until the 1920s, so the people put up with lugging their horse teams aboard the ferry. More and more autos were making the trip as well. As the newly established Pend Oreille County began to grow and expand, it was constantly defending itself and its worth to the state’s larger cities. Snide comments about the “worthless” land in the Calispell Valley came from Spokane newspapers. It was part of the reason the bigwig Indian agents of the region didn’t take up the effort to kick the Kalispel Indians off their land like they had done to native tribes most everywhere else in the nation. Writings in the local newspaper indicated that the white man didn’t have high regard for his Indian neighbors. One article described the plight of the tribe, being bogged with disease and living in ramshackle quarters. The Kalispels at the time numbered fewer than 100 members. In the later part of the decade, World War I headlines covered The Miner’s pages. And with Wolf head of the liberty bond drive, for a couple weeks, the entire front page was a flyer encouraging the people of Pend Oreille to support their country and buy liberty bonds. When the draft was first announced 223 men in the county were on the list. Patriotism was high. As the war ended in 1919, a train bearing a tank and other war remnants made a 45-minute stop in Newport. A thousand people turned out. The people of Pend Oreille were working hard to achieve the American dream. Industry was booming. As ever, things centered on timber. There were ups and
downs with the mills, but the Kaniksu National Forest harvested huge amounts of timber. With large parcels of land newly cleared from logging, agriculture was bigger then by about 100,000 acres of cropland. Near Newport, Charles M. Talmadge started the Silver Birch farm. It had orchards and potato fields, and the strawberries were such a hit that they shipped all the way to Fargo, N.D. Hay was the crop of the Calispell Valley, and across the river from Jared, the Merryweathers grew potatoes so large that when they were served on the dining car of the Northern Pacific, it got the moniker: “Route of the Big Baked Potato.” There were a few creameries, and one sold Newport Ice Cream and White Clover Butter in 1916. Mining was Lewis P. also big in the Larsen teens, and there was talk of a great operation at Bead Lake to go with the already successful claims in the Metaline District. Ione became the area’s second incorporated town (after Newport) in 1910, Metaline Falls followed suit in 1911 when Lewis P. Larsen platted the town that was expected to boom to a city with hundreds of thousands of people, thanks to his mining operations and cement plant. A year later, it got its school building, designed by the renowned architect Kirtland Cutter. It’s the center of community activity today as the Cutter Theatre. Many of the buildings of modern-day Newport’s Washington Avenue were built in the 1910s. They’re remnants of Pend Oreille’s early days and a reminder of the hard work those early settlers put in to make the county what it is today.