![]() The valley of the Snake and Clearwater rivers has such a mild climate as to be called a banana belt. The area soon attracted the attention of some Boston investors who saw agricultural and residential potential in the flat terraces or benches along the southwest bend of the Snake River. He designed the first irrigation system, which soon failed, but he would redeem himself later with significant contributions to the development of Clarkston. Van Arsdol (1851-1941), a former survey engineer for the Northern Pacific Railroad. During the 1890s a ferry landing on the Washington side of the Snake River attracted a few settlers, who named their tiny community Jawbone Flat. Clarkston, on the other hand, had a more sedate beginning and development. A typical wild-west town, Lewiston continued to grow as a supply point for North Idaho mining. Lewiston sprang up in 1861 as a tent city inhabited by miners following the gold discoveries along the Clearwater River and elsewhere in North Idaho. Many Nez Perce, led by Chief Joseph, refused to leave their homeland following their defeat in the Nez Perce War of 1877, some, including Joseph, were relegated to the distant Colville Reservation in North Central Washington and barred from returning to the Nez Perce reservation. After gold was discovered in the area, the reservation was reduced in the 1870s to its present small section of Idaho just southeast of Lewiston and Clarkston, with Lapwai being the primary Nez Perce town and administrative center. The area was the ancestral home of the Nez Perce Indians, who objected so strongly to being moved to the Umatilla Reservation in Oregon, as required by an 1855 treaty, that they were granted a reservation in their own territory, which initially included the site of Lewiston and Clarkston. The Snake and Clearwater drainages soon became centers of fur trade activity. On October 10, 1805, and again on May 4, 1806, Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) and William Clark (1770-1838) camped on the Snake River at the Nez Perce village of Alpowa near the present Port of Clarkston, hence the eventual names of the two towns. Clarkston, the easternmost port in Washington, bustles with huge wheat barges, trains, trucks, and river cruise ships. The final dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers provided enough slack water to enable commercial shipping to both cities. ![]() Although rivals in some respects, the two cities see their interests as mutually connected and in fact maintain a joint Chamber of Commerce. Lewiston has always been the older, larger, and more industrial of the two towns, which since 1899 have been linked by a series of bridges over the Snake River. In 1896 the Lewiston-Clarkston Improvement Company, an irrigation and hydro-electric venture, founded and laid out Clarkston, one of the few early examples of urban planning in the Pacific Northwest. At the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater rivers, it is a twin town with Lewiston, Idaho, just across the Snake River. ![]() With a 2010 population of 7,265, Clarkston is the urban center, though not the county seat, of tiny Asotin County in the southeast corner of Washington. ![]()
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