The Southeast corner experienced Washington’s earliest missionary efforts--the Whitman’s ill-fated 1830s to 1840s established at Waiilatpu--and it remained a focal point with the 1855 Walla Walla treaty council and the U.S. Army’s subsequent garrisoning of Fort Walla Walla. In the 1860s an Idaho mining boom made Walla Walla a supply point offering everything from gold pans and picks to flour and bacon. The town quickly burgeoned into the largest metropolis within the borders of what became Washington State.

    The boom also fostered agriculture. At first farms were limited to river bottoms in the Walla Walla area, but before long they also climbed the slopes and carpeted the Palouse hills with wheat, barley, and oats. Loess--windblown soil that holds moisture and lies 100 feet deep--produced well. A fleet of steamboats, begun in 1859 by the army and expanded to transport miners, soon was carrying the grain to Portland brokers, who shipped it all over the world. Half the value of the crops went to pay transportation costs, however, for the cargo had to be unloaded, portaged, and reloaded to get around rapids. In time, the siren call of profit let railroad companies to solve the problem by threading lines throughout the rich farmlands of the Palouse and into the flood-scoured Channeled Scablands.

    In 1879 the Northern Pacific picked the confluence of the Snake and Columbia rivers—today’s Tri-Cities area--for the beginning of its transcontinental line up the Yakima Valley and over the Cascade Mountains. The rails first provided construction payrolls then brought the link to markets that allowed farm communities to blossom. Industry arrived during World War II when the top-secret Hanford Engineering Works drew thousands of newcomers to develop plutonium for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. At the time, less than a century had passed since Cayuse warriors had rid themselves of the pioneering missionaries at Waiilatpu: the region had passed from frontier to technological center capable of fueling holocaust.