The Northeast corner of the state is a major crossroads. Each summer for at least 9,000 years, Native Americans traveled long distances to fish for salmon at Kettle Falls on the upper Columbia River. In 1810 Canadian fur traders opened a post on the Spokane River-the first commercial structure in what became Washington. Travel through the region to British Columbia mines began in the 1840s, and by the 1850s the lure of gold had drawn prospectors to the Pend Oreille, Columbia, and Kettle rivers. Their increasing encroachment touched off warfare between native warriors and the U.S. Army.

    In 1858 a new era opened. Proportionately small acreage were reserved for native people, while immense opportunities were available to those white settlers and miners suited by attitude and physique for frontier life. Arrival of the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1881 assured Spokane a role as queen of the Inland Empire. The rails linked mines, sawmills, and farms to markets, and Spokane financiers.

    English was not the only language spoken during these first decades of regional and development. French Canadians, Metes (French-Indian), Iroquois, and Hawaiians worked for the fur trade companies. Chinese men arrived to wash gold from placer claims and later helped to build the railroads, joined by crews of Irishmen, Italians, and Greeks. The Finns worked at sawmills and struggled to establish backwoods farms complete with saunas.

    During 1930s the Pend Oreille Valley barely lost out to Grand Coulee, on the Columbia, as the site for a federal irrigation project. Ironically, at the beginning of the 1940s water backed behind Grand Coulee Dam drowned the regions first centers at Kettle Falls and Fort Colville and destroyed orchards on the river benchlands. Logging and, to some extent, mining have continued. Recreation has joined commerce as an economic mainstay.