Some of the earliest published imagery of Whitman County comes from promotional materials.
Some of that is straightforward recruitment, as in magazines and brochures published by the Northern Pacific railroad, hoping to sell the land that they’d received from the government in exchange for building the rail. Some is more academic, works published by the government or others in early explorations. Much falls in between, histories or compilations of biographies which provide glowing reports on the area for their readers.
The Colfax Commoner newspaper began publication in 1885; the Pullman Herald followed in 1888. However, this is an era in which printing images required making individual wood engraved plates. While professional typesetters could lay out the full text of a newspaper one letter at a time amazingly quickly, creating image plates was a slow, tedious and precise process, and as a result local newspapers rarely included images. It’s not until the 1920s or so that we start seeing quantities of local photographs appearing in the local papers.
That said, advancing technology in the 1880s was slowly edging out engraved plate images, and larger presses with slower deadlines could print imagery. As a result, commercial publications promoting the inland northwest are some of the first places we can find published images of our towns.
The 1889 two-volume “History of the Pacific Northwest: Oregon and Washington” totals nearly 1,400 pages of regional history, with most of the second volume being coverage of regional towns and significant individuals. Whitman county is offered up in a little over 200 words, with about another 600 words offered up for Colfax elsewhere in that volume, and that’s it for the county.
However, there are seven lovely illustrations of homes around the county, which could show settlers what lives they could have were they to come out here. All seven depict a clean, shiny and mud-free Palouse region ready to invite new people in.
O’English is the University Archivist at WSU Libraries’ MASC.
