100 years ago in Spokane: Irish ‘patriot’ honored peacefully as ‘million-dollar booze ring’ alarms customs

Spokane’s Irish freedom street procession proved peaceful and orderly, despite earlier warnings from opponents.

Hundreds of people wearing green badges reading, “In Memory of Terence MacSwiney” lined downtown streets to watch a symbolic “funeral cortege” proceed to Our Lady of Lourdes Cathedral.

About 1,500 gathered at the cathedral for a solemn high requiem mass for MacSwiney, the late lord mayor of Cork, who died in a London prison after a hunger strike.

“MacSwiney was not a suicide,” the Rev. Father Carroll of Gonzaga University said in his Lourdes sermon. “He was as much a patriot as the soldier who faces death on the battlefield for his country … The brutish empire which caused it will live to regret it.”

A Protestant pastor in Spokane attempted unsuccessfully to ban the street procession, saying it would foment trouble.

From the booze beat: The Spokane Daily Chronicle trumpeted a juicy scoop: A “million-dollar booze ring” was operating out of Spokane.

“A large portion of the liquor traffic across the (Canadian) line here is financed by a ring of Spokane millionaires who send their agents to British Columbia for the liquor,” said a Canadian customs officer in Port Hill, Idaho.

He claimed that as many as six large autos loaded with liquor crossed the border toward Spokane in a single night.

“And this is not all that crosses the line,” the customs officer said. “There are hundreds of trails through the woods on both sides of Port Hill, where bootleggers hide their liquor, check out through customs office, cross the line and then return to the hiding place for the whisky.”