100 years ago in Spokane: The Columbia Basin irrigation project was a ‘fascinating’ idea to the visiting builder of the Panama Canal

General Gen. George W. Goethals, the man credited with building the Panama Canal, arrived in Spokane to evaluate another project with massive potential: the Columbia Basin irrigation project.

Actually, he was there to evaluate the merits of two competing concepts. The first proposal was to build a giant dam at Grand Coulee and pump water out of the Columbia River. The second was to divert water from the Pend Oreille River and send it to the Columbia Basin through a complex series of canals and tunnels.

The general was noncommittal on those issues, and even about his immediate plans.

“This is a big project and a fascinating one,” Goethals said. “I want to get out on the land as soon as I can. I don’t know when I will go out and I won’t know until I have made a study in the office. I have no definite plans.”

N.W. Durham, the chairman of the Columbia Basin Committee in Spokane, gave a speech to welcome the general: “We believe that the courage to attack big things has not disappeared from the Northwest. History will not say that lack of initiative, or lack of courage, permitted nearly 2 million acres of land to return to perpetual desert.”

From the crime beat: Maurice Codd, 24, was held by police after he allegedly threw Frank P. Brinton, 20, a Fort Wright soldier, over a third-floor railing at the Granite block.

Codd was the former president of Gonzaga University’s student’s association and a medical student. Witnesses said he caused a drunken disturbance and Brinton told him to leave.

Codd rushed at Brinton, pushed him against the railing, “then lifted him bodily and threw him over.” Brinton fell 20 feet to the ground.

Brinton was in serious condition at the Fort Wright hospital with a badly fractured skull.