Conclusion

The liquidation of Dutch assets in Spokane were accelerated by violence both domestic and abroad. In 1912, Petrus Van Dissel’s father-in-law, who had been accused by Springdale citizens as appointing himself town sheriff, clubbed then shot a local bartender to death following a campaign to make Stevens a dry county.^151 A year later, Henry M. Richards, president of the Washington Water Power Co., of which Everwijn Lange Jr. was still a principal shareholder, died in an accident while travelling to survey property in Springdale with E.F. Cartier Van Dissel and Robert Insinger. Both men survived the incident unharmed and served as pallbearers at Richards’ funeral.^152

Internationally, World War I halted all Dutch lending in Spokane from 1914 onward.^153 When the war wound down in 1918, the bank reported back to shareholders that “the demand for good loans in Spokane and the surrounding area was very limited” due to competition from American private mortgage lenders, causing them to close contracts across Washington and Idaho.^154

In 1919, Phoenix Lumber was liquidated.^155 Three years later, Everwijn Lange Jr. formed an American company to liquidate the remaining assets of the Spokane Flour Mills, which had also acquired operations in Pendleton and Seattle.^156 Its board reunited nearly every surviving figure from Lange’s Spokane ventures: D. Huntington, now director of Washington Water Power Company (succeeding the late Henry M. Richards); R. Insinger, of the Northwestern and Pacific Hypotheek Bank in Spokane; and L. S. Lens, a thirty-year veteran of Dutch land schemes, referred to as “our Representative in Seattle.”^157

Notably absent were Petrus and E. F. Cartier Van Dissel. After Lange’s death in 1928, both brothers fell into decline.^158 Petrus took his own life in 1933 amid financial and health crises.^159 E. F. resurfaced years later in Twin Falls while being tried for embezzling mining stocks, later passing in 1940.^160

In 1939, A. R. Van der Loeff attended Robert Insinger’s farewell party, where he presented the former president of the chamber of commerce and longest standing manager of the Hypotheek Bank with a card embossed with the Holland coat of arms.^161 Though the Northwestern and Pacific Hypotheek Bank ceased lending during war time, it did maintain an office in Spokane up until 1970, quietly collecting on its few remaining contracts.^162

Despite extracting hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of natural resources from the Inland Northwest between 1890 and 1920, Everwijn Lange’s Spokane ventures yielded little financial success for his appointed agents. While capital flowed steadily to financiers and shareholders in Amsterdam, the investments also drew fierce criticism. Dutch trade papers repeatedly condemned agents for mismanaged share transfers, misrepresented solvency, and diverted funds, all of which eroded shareholder value and rendered Spokane holdings a persistent drag on investment portfolios.^163

Crucially, Dutch financial interests in Spokane were literally just one name on a registry of thousands during this period. In the 1922 Handbook for the Knowledge of The Netherlands and its Colonies, published by the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Hypotheek Bank’s seized Spokane properties were listed in the same ledgers alongside colonial ventures in Guiana and Dutch Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, revealing how these ventures were administratively organized in the same imperial accounting as formal colonies.^164

The link between Spokane’s foreign-controlled industrial monopoly and its public display of cultural and ethnic imitation, which defined who they were by performing who they were or were not, was almost certainly never articulated by residents or city leaders. This overlapping occurrence may not have been something that registered as odd or unique by Spokane citizens at the time. After all, public displays of mimicry of other cultures, particularly of Native Americans and Asians by European Americans were not uncommon in the Pacific Northwest during this period. Yet, the intensity and centrality of the practice to Spokane’s public culture seems unique to the “Inland Empire” as a designation invented by boosters, largely abandoned after that vision failed to be realized.

If imitation stemmed from settler anxieties over regional and national belonging, the city’s rapid, Dutch-financed reconstruction after the 1889 fire may have intensified that unease. Street scenes from towns within a 250-mile radius of Spokane during this period overwhelmingly depict sparse, single-story agricultural hubs, with commercial centers reaching only two or three blocks. In contrast, Spokane was enabled to overbuild at a rate that even its Dutch financiers noted was artificial and unsustainable, essentially dropping a pocket metropolis onto the plains. The resulting dissonance between the alien environment and pioneer identities were mediated through civic rituals and commercial pageantry.

Future research could clarify ambiguities in this study. A comparative survey of archival materials from parade programs, fair ephemera, exposition brochures, and commercial imagery across Seattle, Tacoma and Portland would reveal how these cities engaged in cultural and ethnic mimicry, and whether their more organic (though still rapid) growth produced less anxiety about regional and national identity than Spokane’s foreign-financed boom.

Further work should also examine other Dutch “industriekolonies” of this era, as identified by Jacob van Hinte in Port Arthur, Texas. Comparing Everwijn Lange Jr.’s Texas oil venture against his timber, flour and land related interests in Spokane could yield a clearer understanding of the long-term economic impacts of such extractive, foreign-controlled enterprises after resource depletion, asset liquidation, and colonial dispersion to international shareholders.

In The Illustrated History of Washington Territory and Valley of the Columbia, Danish-born artist Carl Dahlgren depicted Spokane in the 1880s before the fire.^165 His bird’s-eye perspective documented a modest settlement: a wide dirt road leading to a small commercial cluster, a lone railroad line cutting through, a single mill along the river, and sparse residential houses scattered across the early additions. Unlike later booster materials, the image is not overwhelmed by the potential economic power of the falls or the magnitude of agricultural resources, but focused on a vast sky, distant mountains, and the tall conifers at the city’s edge.^166

Even in this naturalistic portrayal, the artist included a caveat to the objectivity of the image. Dahlgren depicted himself in miniature, seated on a rocky outcrop with parasol and easel. To his right, two men in top hats and canes stand on another ledge beside the artist, one seemingly dictating the artist’s interpretation of the world in front of him.

The rendering hints at a dynamic that would overwhelm Spokane’s life after the fire, where civic rituals, built environments and commercial pageantry were not mirrors of reality but projections of desire shaped by patrons, industrialists and foreign investors. Here, Dahlgren captures the landscape largely as it was: on the threshold of transformation, before fantasy remade it.