100 Years Ago in Spokane: Boosters brag about ‘hygienic’ weather

Spokane’s boosters were constantly bragging about the city’s weather, and now the city’s Department of Health and Sanitation claimed the city’s weather was especially “hygienic.”

A report issued by the bureau noted that high temperatures sometimes climbed above 90 degrees and occasionally above 100.

“This might lead one unacquainted with the climate of Spokane to suppose that prostration from heat, sunstroke, occurs at this place, but such is not the case,” said the report. “On the contrary, little inconvenience seems to accompany temperatures that in other places induce prostration from the heat. Sunstroke is entirely unknown here, save by name.”

The main reason, said the report, was because of Spokane’s low humidity, which rendered the “sensible temperature” to seem lower.

From the irrigation beat: The Spokesman-Review continued its campaign to promote the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project, in which water would be diverted from the Pend Oreille River at Albany (Albeni) Falls and sent via canals and tunnels to arid eastern and central Washington.

The paper’s Sunday magazine included a long feature story about this massive proposed project, complete with photos of the falls and the arid sagebrush lands which would bloom under irrigation. The writer, C.H. Anderson, said that the main canal would be 200 miles long, including 15 miles of tunnels. One of them would go right underneath Spokane’s Cannon Hill. There would also be as many as 10,000 miles of “laterals,” that is, side canals.

“The project would become the largest on the continent,” he wrote. “It’s size does not daunt its supporters who aver the area will appeal to the imagination of the eastern farmer.”

The project’s scope would, in the end, prove far too daunting. It never came to fruition and was superseded by the Columbia Basin project we know today, fed by the Grand Coulee Dam and other Columbia River dams.