of ores, and a number of factories in lumber, stone, iron, pottery, lime, and other articles in daily demand and use. The sales of real estate in Spokane Falls for the year ending in December, 1889, amounted to eighteen million seven hundred and fifty-six thousand three hundred and twenty-three dollars, and for the first seven months of 1890 to ten million eight hundred and seventy thousand dollars.
If you inquire of a citizen of Spokane Falls what makes his city what it is, he will answer you that on one side lies a vast region of the richest agricultural lands, rapidly being populated by intelligent farmers, which whether sown to grain or used to pasture stock are productive of great wealth, and on the other hand there are mining and timber regions productive of even greater wealth. The total output of lumber for 1889 was thirty million feet; while the ore shipments from Coeur d'Alene Mines in the same period were seventy-two thousand tons, of an aggregate value of four million three hundred and twenty thousand dollars. The total of freight brought by the railroads to this city in the last year was about fifty thousand tons, and the freight-bills paid aggregated two million dollars.
The city, notwithstanding its recent losses by fire, paid subsidies to railroads to the amount of four hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and subscriptions to various city institutions to the amount of three hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars.
Such are the figures presented to one. It is plain from these, and from everything we see about us, that there is an abundance of capital in Spokane Falls. Since the fire a good deal of borrowed capital has been employed to build up again, and much of the fine property in sight is covered with mortgages. But this fact does not seem to depress, much less dismay, the mortgagors. They point to the wheat-fields of the Palouse country, the mines of Kootenai, Coeur d'Alene, Colville, and Okanogan, and enumerate with pride the several new railroads which will soon open up other districts, agricultural and mineral, and always mention the truly magnificent water-power which is destined to "turn the wheels of progress." With a population annually almost doubling, it seems probable enough that the paragon city will go on and on until it reaches a rank on the Pacific coast second to no interior city on the Atlantic slope.
