1900s hybrid technology
“Mutual Seduction: Cars & Costumes,” the new exhibit at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, has inspired us to explore a sputtering, clanking topic of local history: the early days of the horseless carriage in the Inland Northwest. Conventional wisdom holds that the first automobile of any kind was brought to Spokane in 1898 by F.O. Berg, the tent-and-awning baron. An archival photo, dated Easter Sunday 1898, shows Berg sitting proudly atop his Locomobile Steamer. Well, that date might be two years premature. A 1908 story in the Spokane Chronicle said that Berg’s steam-driven car, which it calls a Stanley Brothers steamer, was actually the first car in Portland in 1898. Berg said he was sent to New York to buy the car for E.H. Wemme of Portland. The car was shipped to Portland where Wemme “foisted it on the public and succeeded in running it for two years without killing himself or any pedestrians,” according to the Chronicle.
Wemme grew tired of it and sold it in 1900 to Berg, who had it sent by rail to Spokane. Berg’s attempt to drive it away from the rail depot on Cataldo Street turned into a Keystone Kops comedy. Berg put his new car together, fired up the boiler and laid a key part – a bent pipe – on the street behind it to cool. Then he walked around the machine to make sure “everything was taut.”
When he turned to pick up the pipe and reinstall it, he discovered a “junk man or boy had beaten him to it and the thing was gone.” He had to wire to Portland for a replacement. So the first automobile ride didn’t take place until 48 hours later.
Berg later recalled that on that first ride, he “succeeded in starting five runaways” – as in, runaway horses.
“They didn’t have arrest laws in those days, but I got plenty of abuse,” he said.
A 1926 interview with Berg in Spokane Woman magazine makes an even larger claim: that Berg’s Steamer was the first car west of the Mississippi.
Well, it may not have even been the first car in Spokane. On Nov. 17, 1899, the Spokane Chronicle reported that Roy Boulter had bought a gas-powered automobile several months earlier. The only problem: It wouldn’t quite … go.
“The automobile was seen downtown once … tied to a good old-fashioned horse and wagon on the way to the repair shop,” said the Chronicle.
An expert from Kokomo, Ind., was on the way to fix it. Soon “it will be seen speeding about the streets of Spokane,” predicted the Chronicle. The story added that the “engine is a very strong one, being eight horse power.”
But Boulter never did get the car running with its original gas engine. In May of 1900, Boulter re-fitted his car with a new steam engine, which he said was “far superior to the gasoline engine.” The Chronicle said that Spokane now had “two automobiles running about the streets,” the other one possibly being Berg’s car.
By 1902, the Spokane City Directory had its first ever automobile dealer listing – a local bicycle shop. By one estimate, the Spokane-Coeur d’Alene area had as many as 100 autos by 1902.
Then in 1903, Dr. J.L. McGee of Wallace made the front pages by being the first person to drive all the way from Wallace to Spokane.
But it wasn’t easy.
The route through Fourth of July Canyon was more like a path than a road. At one point, McGee’s Rambler rolled down a 25-foot embankment.
“It took four horses to get the machine back on the road,” said the story.
By 1906, Spokane garages were reporting record sales. In 1908, one garage had a whopping 11 machines for sale on the lot. So many autos were on the road, warned Spokane’s street commissioner, that they had “become more damaging to paved streets than any other kind of vehicle.”
In 1910, a motorist named Allen Spear made the news when he was arrested for an astonishing feat: going 40 miles an hour on the North Monroe Street hill.
Up the North Monroe Street hill.
One passenger in Spear’s car disputed that speed reading, saying, possibly tongue-in-cheek, “Why, we were trying the car to see how slowly it would go.”
But the bicycle policeman claimed Spear was going “at least 30 miles per hour and probably more.”
30 or 40 – it didn’t make much difference. The speed limit was 12 mph. Spear was fined $5.
By 1911, 754 cars were registered in Spokane. Two years later, the number had more than doubled to 1,542. The automobile has ruled Spokane’s streets ever since.