Shaping Spokane Jay P. Graves and His Times

One of many pioneer entrepreneurs whose ambitions and enterprises reverberated throughout the West of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jay P. Graves (1860-1948) began modestly enough in hardware in Illinois and promoted himself into mining, transportation, and urban development in the Inland Empire of the Pacific Northwest. Lack of capital and relative obscurity slowed him only temporarily. He parlayed acquaintance into support, involved in his schemes wealthy Canadian bankers and business executives and powerful American industrialists, and played mighty companies against one another. A managerial interest in British Columbia mining projects grew to encompass the incipient Boundary mining district. Graves attracted Montreal investors, appealed to Canadian pride and fear of U.S. domination to entice a railroad into serving Boundary, and eventually built there what was, in its time, the largest copper smelter in the British Empire. The purchase of a bankrupt street railway launched Graves into two decades of urban development in Spokane, Washington. Some of the finest homes and parks in the city owe their existence to Graves, who, together with a group of civic-minded business leaders determined to build a certain kind of city after the Great Fire of 1889, laid out parks and roads and residential areas along the routes of Graves's electric streetcar lines. Graves was also the essential figure in the development of the Spokane and Inland Empire Railroad, a line begun as a lumber hauler between Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and Spokane, that became under Graves's direction a carrier of passengers and freight in the Spokane suburbs and south into the Palouse country of Washingtonand Idaho, snatching business from the Northern Pacific, which had long considered the area its own. Unprepossessing in a gray suit, with a quiet manner, Graves was bold and calculating. Not as colorful or as compelling as hFahey, John is the author of 'Shaping Spokane Jay P. Graves and His Times' with ISBN 9780295973951 and ISBN 0295973951.