Spokane

Spokane is the city that rebuilt itself twice — first from fire, then from rails. It began at the falls of the Spokane River, a gathering place for indigenous peoples for thousands of years before David Thompson's fur traders put the first permanent post in Washington there in 1810. James Glover bought the townsite in 1873 for $4,000 and a sawmill; the Northern Pacific arrived in 1881 and made 'Spokan Falls' the commercial capital of the Inland Northwest.

Then, on August 4, 1889, the Great Fire took thirty-two blocks of downtown in a single night — the same summer that burned Seattle and Ellensburg. The response was immediate and grander: a downtown rebuilt in brick, stone, and terra cotta that still defines the city. Eighty-five years later, Spokane performed a second resurrection: its leaders traded the railroads' riverfront land for a world's fair, and Expo '74 — the first environmentally themed World's Fair, hosted by the smallest city ever to hold one — turned a tangle of rail trestles into Riverfront Park and gave the falls back to the city.

The file keeps Spokane: the falls that made it, the fire that cleared it, and the fair that reclaimed the river — a city twice remade in public view.

Spokane is the archive's comeback file — the 1889 fire, the 1974 fair, and the falls at the center of both.