100 years ago in Spokane: Lewis and Clark student runs away to join Canadian military after Mom forbids him to enlist in U.S. Army

Orville Whipple, a 17-year-old Lewis and Clark High School student, begged to enlist in the U.S. Army, but his mother wouldn’t let him.

“I wanted him to continue his schooling,” she said.

So Orville snuck off and joined the Canadian army.

He was en route to Montreal to go to training camp by the time Mrs. Whipple learned of his plan.

He had told the Canadian recruiters that he was 19 years old and born in Calgary, neither of which were true. She said she learned what happened from the recruiting office, and she told them the truth about Orville.

Officers planned to take him off the train and send him back home when he arrived in Montreal.

From the prohibition beat:

The local courts were clogged with liquor cases.

In one case, the landlady of a Trent Avenue hotel was accused of serving liquor. In another case, the conductor and brakeman of a Northern Pacific train were found guilty of hauling 100 quarts of liquor from Montana and unloading it at Fort Wright,

In a third case, a former saloon man was accused of having two trunks full of liquor in his possession.

Meanwhile, a police officer on the beat thought he smelled something familiar in a storage warehouse. He investigated and discovered two leaky trunks. Whisky was leaking out of both of them.