The road across the Great Bend has been commenced. The road to Colville, Little Dalles, etc., will inevitably be made at an early day.
This would make it really the centre of six roads, counting the Northern Pacific as two.
V. BUILDING GROUNDS.--The city is built and building on both sides of the river, and stands on a level, dry, gravelly plain, a mile or more in width, rising into wooded hills. In other words, it has all that can be desired for situation.
[Sidenote: Sprague, Colfax, and Lewiston.]
Sprague, Colfax, and Lewiston claim attention as indicating the points in a proposed branch line of railroad, leaving the Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railway somewhere in the Great Bend country.
Shops of the Northern Pacific Railroad are in Sprague, which fact is an endorsement of the locality. Its population is over 1,500. The town standing in a coulée, there are no indications of fertility of soil in sight. Here the timber belts seem to end, and no trees are seen for 100 miles eastward. It occupies an intermediate position between the great wheat areas of Whitman County on the south and of Lincoln on the north. Stage lines leave here for Colfax (south) and for Davenport and other towns in the Great Bend (north), and also for the Okanogan mines.
Colfax is about forty miles southwest from Sprague. It is on the Palouse River, in a narrow valley where there is scarcely room for a town. The bordering hills are steep; the surrounding country is some 400 or 500 feet higher than the town. It is claimed, however, that there are good grades to be had for railroads going in any direction. The town has a population of 1,800 to 2,000, and is evidently prosperous. It has water-power and wheat-mills. The railroad agent in the town says that his cash receipts for freight average $1,200 a day. Knapp, Burrell & Co. told me that they brought in 672 carloads of freight annually in the regular course of their business. I felt surprised at the statement. This firm does a farmers' business in barbed wire, wagons, all sorts of agricultural machinery and implements, grain-bags, etc., etc.
Mr. Hamilton imports groceries to the amount of $75,000. Coal is $12.00 a ton. Lumber is scarce and high, and freights enormous. A citizen told me that he had paid $64.30 freight from Portland on a lot of lumber that cost $34.90 in that city. Another marvelous story was that a citizen paid $5.00 a ton for coal in St. Paul and $20.00 a ton to bring it to Colfax.