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Euro-American Settlement

"I came from Kentucky, a tenderfoot.  July 29, 1896 we landed in Spokane, and we came to Newport on the 30th of July.  We were unable to get a steamer so had to take a rowboat.   At 3:00 o'clock we left Newport with seven hundred pounds of baggage, and landed at Usk at sundown.  Being unable to get an overnight lodge, we went to Joe Cusick's homestead.  His house had burned and he was living in his chicken house, but he gave us a room."

Recollections of Mrs. W.I. Fountain as recorded in Historical Sketches of Pend Oreille County.   Cusick, Washington, was named for Joe Cusick.

Railroad map of Idaho, 1896, by George Franklin Cram.  
From the collection of the Library of Congress.

    The U.S. Army lifted its brief ban on immigration east of the Cascade Mountains in 1858 but, because the area was isolated and of questionable value, significant settlement did not get underway until Congress subsidized the development of the Northern Pacific's route through the Pend Oreille River valley in 1864.  With the railroad and the promise of easier transportation came increased settlement, new towns, road development, and accelerated government activity.  By 1879, the Northern Pacific began to sell portions of its federal land grant to settlers who intended to farm the valley.

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