Introduction

In a full-page feature on January 31, 1931, Amsterdam’s Algemeen Handelsblad hailed Spokane, Washington, as “The Playground of the Nation.” The tagline continued, “originally a trading post—Dutch bankers helped make the city great—wheat, apples, metals, and ‘white coal,’” referencing the hydropower of Spokane Falls that was so central to Dutch interests.

The article asked readers to “pronounce the name: Spokhin, not Spo-keen, as you learned in school,” suggesting that the paper’s Dutch readership would have a longstanding familiarity with the Washington city. The author goes on to reference a popular joke between blackface characters Rastus and Sam performed in European music halls.^1 “‘Where is Spokane located’ asks Rastus to Sam. The answer was: ‘Somewhere in Holland’. Loud applause, everyone understood the joke. Because enterprising banks from the Netherlands were godparents at the birth of the new town in the Northwest of America.”^2

On August 4th 1889, a fire destroyed thirty-two blocks of downtown Spokane, effectively sweeping “the entire business portion of the city” away.^3 Self-mythologizing around the fire quickly became part of the narrative around the city, comparing the event to the Chicago fire as an example of the city founder’s “indomitable energy” and thanking the “rich men who came forward, and by their actions and liberal use of money inspired the confidence to make a city.”^4

Not included in this narrative was the fact that a small syndicate of Dutch financiers lent most of the capital involved in this rebuilding.^5 This mortgage lending led to Dutch interests owning twenty-five percent of Spokane, including most of its downtown by 1896, after falling into receivership. At the time, the company urged discretion with this information, as they feared their identity would be interpreted as a foreign-owned monopoly by “western radicals” in Spokane.^6

Contrary to both local booster narratives and traditional understandings of the post-Monroe Doctrine era, this paper argues that Spokane development was not only a story of American enterprise but a complex case of overlapping colonialism. It contends that the settler colonial ambitions of American industrialists were supplanted by the predatory financial schemes and land acquisition of Dutch interests. This interest, originating with the new Dutch merchant class created by the 1870s Cape Era diamond boom, flowed into American railway bonds and ultimately established a foreign-controlled financial market in Spokane. Between the fire of 1889 and the liquidation of Dutch assets in 1923, Spokane’s aggressive public display of both exclusionary and aspirational iconography was less an expression of civic pride than a cultural assertion of an American identity designed to obscure its complicated, foreign financial relationships.

The foundational scholarship on Dutch investment in Spokane comes from Eastern Washington University professor John Fahey. While Fahey’s work meticulously documents what Dutch investors acquired and where they invested in Spokane, this project explores why they chose this specific region and how capital flowed from the Netherlands to the Inland Northwest through international financial and promotional networks. Context is utilized through scholarly work providing an overview on Dutch global ventures, the introduction of American railway bonds in Amsterdam, and the new class of Dutch workers whose sudden wealth fueled overseas speculation. This work also draws on research documenting the emergence of immigration departments within major railroads to boost foreign settlements and how their booster publications helped market this business model to foreign and domestic audiences.

This paper situates Spokane within evolving ideologies of U.S. expansion. Research on settler colonialism and anti-imperial discourse helps contextualize the tension between America’s professed aversion to foreign entanglement and its own imperial practices, both continental and overseas. Contemporaneous Dutch-language accounts, including firsthand narratives from key financiers operating in Spokane, provide an external vantage point rarely captured in American sources.

Joseph Van Hinte, widely regarded as the leading historian of Dutch-American settlements, drew a sharp distinction between “workingman’s colonies” and “unscrupulous large-scale flim flam” investment ventures.^7 In his 1928 work Nederlanders in Amerika, Hinte distinguished eight “true Dutch settlements” from three simply “built by Dutch capital”, indicating remote control of resources unsupported by a resident community of Dutch immigrants: Norfolk, Virginia; Port Arthur, Texas; and Spokane, Washington. Written by Dutch authors for Dutch audiences, these international resources allow new pathways to understand how Spokane was a uniquely international project, materially built and symbolically influenced by foreign colonial assets.

The centrality of European American settlers’ imitation of other cultures in Spokane’s civic pageantry and commercial iconography was exemplified in the 1913 Pow Wow program. Led by organizers and city leaders in Indigenous dress, the events featured “fifty Zulu cannibals,” “The Thirty Six Tribes of American Indians,” the Gonzaga College band made up as various tribes, and Lewis and Clark High School staging an ethnic reenactment of their namesake expedition.^8

Spokane citizens’ demonstrations of who they were not through imitation were counterbalanced by similarly broad expressions of who they were or who they aspired to be. Settler identities as American citizens, with a lineage that gave them rights to and privileges over the land, were bolstered by processions like “Olde Colonial Days.” This event in the 1913 Pow Wow featured a George Washington character in a powdered wig balancing on stilts, waving his tri-cornered hat to attendees as a marching band followed behind.

While this kind of cultural imitation was not uncommon among European American communities in the Pacific Northwest, its scale and significance in Spokane were closely tied to the broader promotional project of the “Inland Empire.” Now associated with central California, the term initially circulated in the 1860s as a hypothetical region within an expanding continental empire. An 1869 article in the Idaho Statesman, for instance, clarified that Corrine, Utah, was “not the right place for the great and coming Inland Empire.”^9 After being periodically associated with The Dalles, Washington throughout the 1870s, an organized push from multiple news sources established the Inland Empire as the “eastern half of Oregon, the eastern half of Washington territory and the Northern half of Idaho” in 1883.^10

Spokane’s post-fire transformation was not a triumph of rugged American individualism but the product of financial influence that quietly supplanted local enterprise with foreign control. Far from contradicting the spirit of US expansion, these foreign interests overlapped with American imperial ambitions, leveraging the rhetoric of settler colonialism while consolidating economic power through mortgage banking, asset liquidation, and strategic obscurity. Beneath the city’s pervasive hierarchy-focused iconography, disseminated through parades, expositions, and booster literature, was a performative assertion of American identity in reaction to a built environment made possible through international capital.