lion, a hotel costing nearly two hundred thousand dollars, a handsome post-office, cable and electric street railroads, electric and gas lighting, the power furnished by the falls, water-works, and every other modern appliance of a luxurious civilization, are to be found here. Yet Spokane Falls is three hundred and seventytwo miles west of Helena, the nearest city on the east, and four hundred miles east of any western metropolis, standing alone between the Missouri Eiver and Puget Sound, with seven railroads radiating to all the points of the compass, and bringing to it the contributions of an immense area of trade.
The population of Spokane Falls is about thirty thousand. There are, I am told, a hundred business blocks, costing from thirty thousand dollars to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars each, covering the burnt district, and a thousand residences being erected. These latter are chiefly of a cost to suit people of moderate means; but the city contains a goodly number of elegant and even sumptuous dwellings, excelled by few in any part of the United States, and the impression conveyed by a tour about the streets from which business is excluded is that there is an unusual number of refined homes in proportion to the population. This impression is confirmed by the testimony of house-furnishing establishments, more goods of a costly character being sold in Spokane Falls than in any other town in Washington. How far the merchants themselves are responsible for this extravagance—for in too many instances it is extravagance —can only be conjectured; but I know that the same fully prevailed in California in an early period, and that it was accounted for not only by the facility with which money was acquired, but by the fact that cheap goods were not imported, and there were no local manufactories, therefore people were compelled to buy that which the market afforded. The excuse of the merchants was that for such long distances and high rates of freight it did not pay to import cheap articles. This truth at once points to the importance of home manufactures.
The city has four daily newspapers and several weeklies, nineteen churches, numerous schools, public and private, three colleges, a home for the friendless, seven banks, a mining exchange, and many handsome public buildings. It has mills for grinding wheat and sawing timber, a smelter for the reduction
