wheat-producing region, but is waiting for the completion of the Washington Central to start it on a career of prosperity, to be supplemented by the arrival of the Great Northern, whose route is not yet selected.
There are a number of towns in that part of the Big Bend country included in Lincoln County, near the Columbia, among which Wilbur is spoken of as taking the lead as an agricultural centre. A country that grows wheat and oats six feet, and rye eight feet in height, should have towns every thirty miles, and is a good land in which to place the agricultural college.
Coulee City, on the Columbia, is a striking example of the growth of towns in this age of town-building. A quarter of a year ago there was nothing here but a camp of railroad graders. All about waved perennial grasses, while the view was broken here and there by dikes of crumbling basalt, and the only moving things in the landscape, aside from the railroad graders, were a few cattle feeding, a rabbit, perhaps, followed by a sneaking coyote, or a curlew lifting its watchful eyes and long bill above a tuft of the prevailing bunch-grass. But now! Well levelled streets stretch from one side of the town-plot to the other. Two good bridges span the creek on which it stands; substantial buildings are rising all along the main avenue; wellstocked stores and business houses of every class are in place, and the improvements belonging to a railroad division station are already here. A system of water-works is under construction, a school-district is organized and a school-house under way, with a church-building in contemplation, a seven-column newspaper on the spot, and a bank promised. Such is the method of all these railroad or land-company towns. This one is expected to be the terminal point for freight going to Okanogan, Methow, Lake Chelan, Wanacut Lake, Waterville. Douglas City (on the road from Sprague), and the Conconully country. So long as it holds this position it will make progress, and in the end establish itself on the merits of the Big Bend country.
Coulee claims the attractions of being in the midst of "the best agricultural lands to be found out of doorsa cool climate in summer, but one that will bring to perfection all the fruits of the temperate zone. In the vicinity is a bottomless lake surrounded by a natural park, and that by scenes of the utmost
