Pinkney City
This is the second in what will be a series
of twenty caches that will have you traveling a "loop" from
Colville, north on Aladdin Road to near the Canadian border on Deep
Lake Boundary Road, and then back around to Colville through
Northport and Kettle Falls. The series will have a few little side
trips but it should be doable in a day with no problem. Please note
that not all of the caches will be placed and active at the same
time. We started with #6 and will get them all completed as quickly
as we can.
A little bit of history on Pinkney that I was
able to gather from "Exploring Washington's Past" by Ruth
Kirk and Carmela Alexander
"Pinkney City has vanished. Drive 3 miles
northeast of Colville on Aladdin Road to reach the site, now a
hayfield - a classic example of how ephemeral the seemingly
permanent may actually be. (A roadside sign identifies the general
area of Pinkney City; the actual town stood north of Mill Creek in
a long north-south valley.)
The community sprang up in the early 1860s
alongside the U.S. Army's Fort Colville as a civilian supply point
for miners, settlers, off duty soldiers, and native people. Its
name is that of the fort's commander, Major Pinkney Lugenbeel.
Freight wagons from Wallula (near the confluence of the Snake and
Columbia rivers) supplied both town and fort via the 250 mile
Colville Road until 1881, when the Northern Pacific reached Spokane
and shortened the distance.
The town served as a seat of a county that
stretched across all of what is now northeast Washington and on to
the continental divide. In bestowing that status, however, the
territorial legislature changed Pinkney's City's name to Fort
Colville, a third pinpoint of white occupancy given that name:
first was the Hudson's Bay Company's trading post, then the U.S.
Army's fort, [monument back near the gravel pit] and finally the
town. The general populace, however, continued to use the original
name and to bemoan the need to travel so far to handle official
business. In the book Spokane Corona, Jennie Bell, a
teacher, is quoted regarding her journey to Pinkney City from the
Spokane area to get her certificate: 'I rode on horseback. There
were no bridges... so the streams had to be forded and, when the
water was high, all one could do was to crawl into the saddle, tuck
in one's skirt, and let the horse swim across. '
In 1883 the fort closed and civilians moved
to the present townsite of Colville."
