Asian American Footprints in Downtown Spokane
Chinese Americans in Spokane
Many of the first Chinese migrants to northeast Washington arrived to mine gold discovered along the banks of the Columbia River and Pend Oreille Rivers near towns such as Colville and Metaline Falls in the 1850s. Areas along the rivers called China Bend and Chinaman Bar indicate the visibility of Chinese miners at that time. As the small mining operations wound down over the course of the 1800s, some of the Chinese immigrants who remained in the region settled in Spokane, which, by 1890, had become a burgeoning city.