Spokane Falls, being west of the Columbia and quite as near Tacoma as Spokane. But the latter is making all the effort to connect it by railroad to itself, and will undoubtedly prevail,— the Spokane and Northern and the Washington Central both reaching out after it. A more particular account of the Okanogan mines is reserved for another place.
The remainder of East Washington included between the Columbia and Snake Fivers on the west and south is divided by popular consent into the "Big Bend country," consisting of six or seven millions of acres enclosed by the western bend of the Columbia, whose southeast line extends from a point twentyfive miles west of Spokane Falls to Pasco, near the junction of the Columbia and Snake Fivers, and "the Palouse country," which includes all of Whitman County, or all the country on the Palouse Fiver and its branches.
A subdivision of the Big Bend country is known as "Sagebrush land," and this strip, unfortunately for the pleasure of travellers of the present period, is on the main line of the Northern Pacific Failroad. The soil is a light sandy loam, which is not any where available, without irrigation, for the purposes of agriculture, but in this case is also "scabby," or roughened with outcroppings of basalt.
The western part of the Big Bend country, embracing between four and five million acres, was originally covered with the nutritious bunch-grass, and wherever bunch-grass grows the land is good for farming without irrigation,—a discovery only made in recent times. One may travel a whole day (by stage) between Moses's Fancho and the mouth of the Okanogan Fiver without seeing in any place .ten acres of land which cannot be ploughed and which will not return a rich harvest. I have it from good authority, Judge W. Lair Hill, of Seattle, that the Big Bend country contains "two thousand square miles of the finest wheat land on earth," and I learn from residents in it that there are no less than fifty thousand acres in crop this year which will yield twenty-five bushels to the acre. Its only way out, however, is by wagon to Ellensburg on the west side of the Columbia. No wonder the people of Spokane, Ellensburg, and the Big Bend country are impatient for a railroad.
Waterville is the county-seat of Douglas County in this great
