two hundred feet above the ordinary stage. Below the canon a few miles is a fall of great height. This is in the Metaline mining district, of which I shall have more to say in another place.
The whole of East Washington lying between the forty-eighth and forty-ninth parallels is divided into three parts of about equal extent; that lying east of the upper Columbia is spoken of as the Colville country, and is both agricultural and mineral in its resources. A separate account being given of its several mining districts it is necessary here only to remark that it contributes daily from forty to one hundred tons of smelting-ores to the works in Spokane Falls.
Colville Valleys is a body of rich land, which extends from the mouth of Colville River to within forty-five miles of Spokane Falls. In the days of the Hudson Bay Company's occupation Fort Colville was a point of the greatest importance to the American missionary settlements, one of which was on the Little Spokane River, and the others at Walla Walla and on the Clearwater, in Idaho. All the wheat the southern missionaries had to eat for several years came from the Colville Yalley, and was carried on horseback to their station, one hundred and fifty miles!
The Roman Catholic fathers also established missions, a little later than the Protestants, in the Colville country and among the Cœur d'Alenes and Pend d'Oreilles. Of the Protestant missions there remains hardly a trace, but the Catholics still hold their ground. The first log house of the Catholic mission at Kettle Falls, on the Columbia near the company's fort, may still be seen, but the spirit of it has removed to the newer town of Colville, a dozen miles east of the Columbia. This place was the joint result of mining and military matters, a post having been established here during the Indian disturbances of 1859, which followed upon the rush to the British Columbia mines. Some French and half-breed settlers, with a few Americans, remained in the valley upon farms, where civilization is at length in danger of overtaking them. A railroad—the Spokane and Northern—passes up the Valley to Colville, and terminates beyond at Little Dalles of the Columbia, where the great river offers one of its several obstacles to navigation.
