Alan Liere: My Little Spokane River

I just bought a copy of Ty Brown’s new book, “Along the Little Spokane River – A Sense of Place,” and the text and historic pictures have brought back a flood of memories.
The Little Spokane, you see, was MY river – at least the section from Pine River Park (which Brown’s book tells me was originally called Greenleaf Park) to Devil’s Hole (which is downriver from the Dartford Bridge in the area called Waikiki Springs.)
As far as I was concerned, beginning nearly 75 years ago my real life began as a 6-year-old old when my family moved from an apartment on the South Hill of Spokane to a new home near what is now Franklin Park. Immediately, I began exploring vacant lots, pine forests and the mud puddles in the alley, and my parents began to wonder how this boy with the unreasonable interest in frogs, grasshoppers and nightcrawlers could have been created from a pairing of genes that looked upon such creatures only as pests.
At age 7, I was introduced vicariously to fishing, thanks to a neighbor who kept a tub of waterdogs in his garage, a place where I would often visit to be regaled with his stories of Eloika Lake and her largemouth bass. This led to pleas for my father to take me fishing.
Dad eventually gave in during our second summer in the new house. One glorious day in July, we rented a boat for a dollar at Eloika Lake and fished with worms for perch rather than bass. Dad was disappointed at the size of the colorful 7-inch fish, but I thought each one wonderful; I was finally experiencing fishing – something that really made sense. Even the smell of the lake begged me to return, and from that point on, it was I who was hooked.
I learned a lot about fishing that year, and from crude maps and conversations with older cousins, I learned more about the Little Spokane drainage. Eloika Lake was part of the West Branch of the Little Spokane River, but there were other lakes – Horseshoe, Trout and Sacheen. I thought Fan Lake was there too, but Brown’s book told me otherwise while detailing a fascinating history of the people who settled in this area – from native Americans like Curly Jim to J.P Graves and Louis Davenport.
When I discovered the Little Spokane River was only about 5 miles from my home, I talked my mom into driving me to the small bridge over the river at the end of Wandermere Golf Course to explore. After that first time, I saved enough money from mowing lawns to buy a $10 used bike. With a fishing pole strapped to the handlebars and a sandwich and a coffee can of worms in the basket, I was on my own. It was a long bike ride, and the return trip – after a day of fishing for suckers and trout, catching crawdads and sculpin by hand and generally staying gloriously wet and muddy for seven or eight hours – seemed to take days. Mom didn’t ask me much about these adventures, but as parents were wont to do in those more innocent times, she waved goodbye in the morning and turned me loose, admonishing me only to be home for dinner.
Before long, I was riding my bike to the Little Spokane at least once a week throughout the summer, and over the years I was joined by friends. When we got to about the sixth grade, we would stop at a tiny Mom and Pop grocery store where a 76 service station now sits on the northeast side of the corner of Division and Hastings. To prove to one another we were bad boys, we would buy Crooks Rum-Soaked Cigars and try to smoke them without gagging.
The best fishing holes were under the small bridge that crossed the river on Little Spokane Drive and a few yards upstream where the Wandermere Golf Course creek emptied into the river in the shadow of the big highway bridge above. Farther down the river was the Dartford Bridge (a great swimming hole) and after that, Devil’s Hole. I was learning to read the water, and garden worms were my “lure” of choice. I caught a lot of trout – too many really. The limit then was 12 and I creeled that number several times. Catch-and-release was something I didn’t consider until much later. My father and I enjoyed eating the trout, but my mom and sister wouldn’t touch them.
I caught mostly rainbow trout under a foot in length from all of these spots, but there was also an occasional brook trout or brown trout, and even a bullhead, a small crappie and a skinny perch along with many large northern pikeminnows and suckers. Once I caught a 23-inch fish I couldn’t identify. I took it to the Fish and Wildlife office just north of the Y where it was identified as a mackinaw. No one could tell me how it got into the Little Spokane. Sadly, I never had a chance to catch one of the salmon that Brown mentions in his book, as the river had long before been dammed at Little Falls and Long Lake to benefit logging, irrigation and milling operations. Neither did I catch any of the near leg-long rainbow trout pictured by happy anglers in the book, but I did take some beautiful red-striped 16-inchers from Devil’s Hole.
I don’t know where the Devil’s Hole moniker originated, and I’ve wondered if it was I and my group of cigar-smoking friends who named it that. There was nothing obviously ominous about the big, dark pool below the rocks, but I guess we could easily imagine scary things along with the big trout in its depths. My friends and I would fish, and later, strip to our underwear and jump off the rocks to prove how brave we were. I’d like to go back sometime and see if the trout are still there and if that long drop to the water is as long as I have remembered it.
After I got my first car, a 1950 purple and rust-colored Chevrolet, I began exploring and fishing the Little Spokane watershed even more – near Indian Painted Rocks, the fish hatchery, Scotia Creek, Chain Lake and Dragoon Creek. There was a lot of early Spokane history everywhere I turned – old bridge abutments, stone fences, primitive log structures. I discovered that the tiny creek (at one time called Sheep Creek and now called Dartford Creek) that ran by Commellini’s Restaurant on Dartford Road had a population of small but vibrantly colored rainbow trout, and I pursued them often by wading down the creek in tennis shoes, dropping my worm behind structure and into the smallest changes of current.
Twice, I hooked and lost the “Commellini Monster,” a 10-inch rainbow that lived in a small pool that could only be accessed by crawling through a culvert under the road.
I wonder today if there’s a fish like that still there, and I pray that most of all, in these times of so much change, this unique region can retain its natural and cultural heritage.
To me, the Little Spokane was all about fishing, but it was and is a whole lot more than that.
Ty Brown’s book may be purchased at the Wandermere Ace, Mel’s Gifts, Auntie’s Books, REI and Kalispel Golf and Country Club.