[Illustration: VIEW IN THE SPOKANE VALLEY.]
Spokane Falls is a growing, pushing town, and the falls of the Spokane river, from which the town takes its name, afford one of the most beautiful and interesting sights on the line of the Northern Pacific road. There are over a dozen distinct falls within a half a mile, one of which is over sixty feet in perpendicular height. Several of these falls are split into various channels by small islands or pillars of basaltic rock. At one place, where two of these channels unite in a common plunge into a small pool, the water is thrown up in a beautiful, shell-like cone of white foam, to a height of nearly six feet. It is estimated by competent engineers that the river at this point furnishes a water-power equal in the aggregate to that of the Mississippi at St. Anthony's Falls. Every passenger over this route should certainly stop off and spend a few hours viewing the falls of the Spokane river.
The bear, like man, inhabits almost every latitude and every land, and has even been translated to the starry heavens, where the constellations of the Great Dipper and the Little Dipper are known to us as well as to the ancients as _Ursi Major_ and _Minor_. But North America furnishes the largest and most aggressive species in the grizzly (_Ursus horribilis_), the black (_Ursus americanus_), and the polar (_Ursus maritimus_) bears, and here the hunter finds his most daring sport. Of all the known plantigrades (flat-footed beasts) the grizzly is the most savage and the most dreaded, and he is the largest of all, saving the presence of his cousin the polar bear, for which, nevertheless, he is more than a match in strength and courage. Some specimens measure seven feet from tip of nose to root of tail. The distinctive marks of the species are its great size; the shortness of the tail as compared with the ears; the huge flat paws, the sole of the hind foot sometimes measuring seven and a half by five inches in a large male; the length of the hind legs as compared with the fore legs, which gives the beast his awkward, shambling gait; the long claws of the fore foot, sometimes seven inches in length, while those of the hind foot measure only three or four; the erect, bristling mane of stiff hair, often six inches long; the coarse hair of the body, sometimes three inches long, dark at the base, but with light tips. He has a dark stripe along the back, and one along each side, the hair on his body being, as a rule, a brownish-yellow, the region around the ears dusky, the legs nearly black, and the muzzle pale. Color, however, is not a distinctive mark, for female grizzlies have been killed in company with two cubs, one of which was brown, the other gray, or one dark, the other light; and the supposed species of "cinnamon" and "brown" bears are merely color variations of _Ursus horribilis_ himself.