For sheer, obvious geological shaping, few places on earth can match north central Washington. Successive floods of basalt lava two miles thick form a sagebrush plateau now conquered by agriculture. North of this realm lie the Okanogan Highlands, dotted by huge boulders that rode ice-age glaciers out of Canada, and the west rise outliers of the Cascade Mountains. The Columbia River skirts the plateau, flowing as much as 2,000 feet below it.

    Native people felt the impending arrival of the white newcomers in the mid-1700s: they also began to contract diseases previously unknown. in 1811 explorer David Thompson traveled down river and opened the fur trade era, and half a century later the Hudson’s Bay Company moved its operations out of the region and into Canada, closing the first chapter of white history. By then placer miners were washing river gravel for gold, and cattle kings were trailing hers to boomtowns and wintering them in the area around Loomis.

    Unfenced land serves as a great common for grazing cattle, horses, and sheep, which by the mid-1880s had eliminated the regions pristine cover of waist high bunchgrass. Rails arrived about the same time and with them came thousands of settlers, many directly recruited by the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern companies, which operated special display cars in the eastern United States and sent agents to talk with land-hungry Europeans. Wet years encouraged a belief that farming was possible. Dry years reversed the optimism.

    Today orchards tuft river benches and huge irrigated fields augment a coverlet of dryland wheat. Where horses previously pulled plows, harrows, weeders, drills (for planting seeds,) mowers, binders, headers and wagons, tractors now prepare the soil and reap the harvest, and computers control the flow of irrigation, much of it from the Grand Coulee Dam project. Freight wagons, pack-trains, and paddle-wheel steamers have become memory; bridges have replaced ferries; and railroads play a role secondary to highways, which well-engineered grades and gently sweeping curves. A certain vastness non-the-less lingers in north central Washington, an unmistakable sense of place.

    In 1814 Alexander Ross of the North West Fur Company entered the Kittitas Valley (near Ellensburg) hoping to buy horses. He found an awesome sight:

...a camp, of which we could see the beginning but not the end!...Councils, root-gathering, hunting, horse-racing, foot-racing, gambling, singing, dancing, drumming, yelling and a thousand other things....were going on around us.

    Forty-one years later Yakima tribal chiefs opened a three-year futile struggle to stop miners from crossing their lands and churning up the Columbia River by steamer en route to gold rushes. Soon, however, newcomers had settled to raise cattle, a crop that could transport itself to market and, by the 1880s, farmers were planting wheat on former ranchland and grinding it for livestock feed and flour at local mills such as those still lingering at the Union Gap and Thorp. In time settlers experimented with irrigation; by the early 1900’s, their trials expanded into a federal reclamation project.

    Rail connections linked the region to markets, and mountain lakes swollen by dams into reservoirs fed canals that turned the Kittitas and Yakima valleys in swaths of green, a process that continues today as Columbia Basin Project water converts sagebrush and wild flowers into agribusiness vineyards and orchards.

    Along the southern edge of the region the Columbia River remains an all-season route across the state, reliable even when winter storms close mountain passes. The river carriers ever-increasing barge, rail, and automobile traffic---and offers a timeless, dramatic transition from Washington’s dry interior to its wet west-side.