National Affairs: The INLAND EMPIRE

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ACROSS the wind-blown plains of eastern Washington, up through the cool, forested hills of northern-Idaho and the mountains and finger valleys of western Montana, men talk in frontier terms of manifest destiny, and call their northwest U.S. land an Inland Empire. It is a towering land, with long, lonely reaches and stupendous, high-country scenery, proud, self-assured and close to its pioneer beginnings. A geographic unit, hemmed by natural barriers, it once almost became a state (as big as all New England, New York, Delaware and Maryland) called Lincoln. Congress approved in 1886, but Grover Cleveland pocket-vetoed the bill on the advice of his politically potent First Assistant Postmaster General Adlai Stevenson, who feared that south Idaho, if left to itself, would become a Mormon commonwealth.

The logic of terrain still prevails: from the Rockies to the Cascades, the Inland Empire, which revolves around Spokane, is a trans-mountain stranger to the populous cities of coastal Washington and Oregon, to the potato farmers of south Idaho and to the ranchers of Montana's eastern plains. In lusty growth (its population has swelled by 51% since 1940), it is building new towns and industry on a solid base of natural treasures: rich grainland including the nation's top wheat-producing county (Whitman County, Wash.), lush wild-grass valleys providing year-round range for sheep and cattle, the U.S.'s last great stand of valuable whitepine lumber and huge mineral resources in Washington's Metaline and Idaho's Coeur d'Alene gulches and in Butte's mile-high hill.

Decades ago, the spirit of the Inland Empire was colored by lack of irrigation and power, and by painful dependence on Eastern finance. The sense of a great future and a hard present bred within the region a restless, resentful spirit. From time to time, when Idaho's lead mines shut down, when grain prices fell and Washington's Big Bend wheat fields dried up, native brands of radicalism took hold. Nostrums like Populism were laced with occasional dynamitings; the Northwest was a pre-World War I citadel of the I.W.W. Those days are past, but the tradition remains, and "Eastern finance" is still a repugnant term. The New Deal was credited with power and irrigation, the colossus of Grand Coulee bringing alive Hanford's atomic energy plant, mushrooming cities, drawing industry and providing water for empty land. Today, in an empire lacking private local capital to meet the increasing dreams of manifest destiny, federal help still looms large, and U.S.-financed works find vigorous support even from otherwise conservative Republicans. Item: for 35 years, following the same trail over which the Lewis and Clark Expedition first entered the country in 1805, Idaho has tried to complete a new, direct highway across the precipitous Bitterroot Mountains to link Portland and the East. Without increased federal help, most citizens of the state now agree, it may never be accomplished.