Talk:Inland Empire (Pacific Northwest)

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I'm from western Montana and I've never heard the name "Inland Empire". It strikes me as a tourist slogan, can anyone confirm the term's use? Hyacinth 20:12, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)

According to Merriam-Webster's Geographical Dictionary, the Inland Empire covers not only Eastern Washington (as the article originally had it) but northern Idaho, northeastern Oregon, and far-western Montana, as well. The far-western Montana and northeastern Oregon bit were news to me, though I always knew about eastern Idaho--but there it is in the dictionary, plus a little Googling did turn up mentions of the other areas. Perhaps it should be specified that only FAR-western Montana is meant.

It's definitely not a tourist slogan, though--I hate those. It's been in use for many years.

--Lukobe 21:20, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I'm a student from MSU and my science work is about Inland Empire. Could someone help me? I've written to Mr.Lukoff who created the map, but no answer recieved... I'm very interested in the way counties were included. For example it seems strange to me that Missoula and other Montana counties are included cause they're separated by the Bitterroot range. Thank you. --Boardpizza 14:37, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Sorry I never got back to you. I included those Montana counties because of evidence in the geographical dictionary, and Web evidence that some others, at least, considered far western Montana part of the region. Examples: http://www.aahaminlandempire.org/, http://visitmt.com/categories/moreinfo.asp?IDRRecordId=14180&SiteId=1, http://www.betterinvesting.org/chapter/inland/volunteers (these aren't the particular sources I used when I made the map, just ones I just now found on Google). So I picked the far western counties of Montana and the far northeastern ones of Oregon. --Lukobe 21:58, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

By the way, shouldn't this be merged with Inland Northwest? --Lukobe 22:02, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Thank you very much! Well, im trying to define it's modern borders through cities and counties websites research. My investigation is based on your map so it was important to know the source. The other question deals with these terms. Are "Inland Empire" and "Inland Northwest" equal? Or Inland Empire is a kind of relic and Inland NW is just a way to emphasize its contrast to Pacific NW? I may be wrong. Thank you for your time. I hope my english is quite understandable.. --Boardpizza 02:25, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Your English is fine, and better than my Russian! I think the "Inland Empire" and the "Inland Northwest" are the same thing, and that the latter is just a more modern term, to get away from the negative connotations of "empire." (It wouldn't be in contrast to "Pacific Northwest," because Eastern Washington and northeastern Oregon are unquestionably part of the Pacific Northwest, and the Idaho Panhandle is often considered part of the PNW too. --Lukobe 03:49, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Contents 1 Exact boundaries? 2 Source? 3 Distinctions? 4 Inland Empire investigation

[edit] Exact boundaries?

I'm curious -- who determined the rather exact boundaries of the region? This is very rare among U.S. regions that include parts of more than one state. Is there some sort of regional commission or board? How did individual counties get included or excluded? If there's a central authority of any sort, it should be included in the article. (What I'm really hoping here is that the exact boundaries were not created by a Wikipedia editor, which would raise a no original research issue.) MCB 00:22, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

Out here in the West, we've got things known as "mountain ranges". They're pretty effective at determining boundaries. Western Washington is considered to run from the Pacific ocean to the Cascade Mountains -- and guess what? The eastern borders of the counties making up Western Washington run along the ridgeline of the Cascades. The Inland Northwest is usually considered to be bounded by the Cascade Mountains in Washington and the Bitterroot Mountains separating Idaho and Montana. Since the county borders also follow these lines, it's possible to have very precise borders on a map. --Carnildo 20:13, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Source?

Does anybody know the source/meaning of the name? It's rather confusing to me, who's never been out there. --Dd42 17:59, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I would like some information on this as well. Why is it called this? Who decided what counties were included?Kiaparowits 20:05, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Distinctions?

Is there even a vague theme distinguishing the Inland Empire from surrounding regions? Lonestarnot 20:11, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Culturally, the Inland Empire/Inland Northwest is those parts of the US for which Spokane is the biggest city in the area. In terms of industry, agriculture and mining are big. In terms of climate, it's the semi-desert areas in the rainshadow of the Cascade Mountains.

Of course, I don't have references for any of this. --Carnildo 20:23, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Inland Empire investigation

Hey everybody. I'm the student of Moscow State University (Department of foreign countries), Russia, and my sience work is tightly connected with Inland Empire region. The main target is to define its borders nowadays. I try to define it through internet sites research. So i'm really intersted in the region. Could you please (citizens of Washington, Idaho, Montana and Oregon) tell me some facts about it? Is the term "Inland Empire" widely used? Do you think you're living in it? Is the term "Inland Empire" means the same thing as "Inland Northwest"? Any kind of information would be very valuable for me! Thank you. Simon Freydlin --Boardpizza 14:19, 23 January 2006 (UTC) P.S. Feel free to write me on this theme: boardpizza@mail.ru

The "Inland Empire" or "Inland Northwest" doesn't really have well-defined boundaries. It's basically the part of the United States that has the city of Spokane as the cultural and economic center. The western boundary area is traditionally considered to be the Cascade Mountains, and the northern boundary is the Canadian border. The eastern and southern boundaries aren't as well-defined, and people in Yakima and the Tri-Cities area don't always agree that they're part of the Inland Northwest.

As for the difference between "Inland Empire" and "Inland Northwest", "Inland Empire" is an older term, and is used mostly when someone wants to create a feeling of greater importance or refer to some time in the past, while "Inland Northwest" is used the rest of the time. --Carnildo 05:26, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

The Inland Empire is connotative of the geographic region under control by capitalist interests centered in Spokane in the late 19th and first half of the 20th century. Local railroad magnates like D.C Corbin and Jay P. Graves also had interests in mining and hydro power and used Spokane as their center of operations. Mountain ranges or rivers were not the boundaries of this region, rather, it was a function of a place's economic ties to Spokane that drove the region's definition. In fact, southern portions of British Columbia were arguably part of the Inland Empire, as they were the reach of these early capitalist. William Cowles, whose family still owns the Spokesman-Review and the NBC affiliates in Spokane and the Tri-Cities, is also an important character in the Inland Empire. For those researchers out there, a good book to read would be the "News for an empire; the story of the Spokesman-review of Spokane, Washington, and of the field it serves." By Ralph E. Dyar, 1952. It reads somewhat like propaganda for the Inland Empire, but it provides historical insight into how the capitalist interests in the region guided growth and development as well as big federal dollars to the arid Columbia Basin. As noted above, parts of the Columbia Basin and Western Montana do not consider themselves part of this Inland Empire anymore. This is the consequence of substantial population growth and greater independence in news media and economic development influences over the past 50 years. One might argue that the Inland Empire has been shrinking since the the construction of Hanford with the emergence of the Tri-Cities as an independent economic region. The Inland Empire these days is probably shrunk to match the newspaper market of the Spokesman-Review as shown in this map: http://www.nwnn.com/dmaspok.html. I would suggest that Inland Empire be separate from Inland Northwest, since Inland Northwest is a new marketing scheme that seeks to divorce itself from old capitalist interest and focuses more on the geographic region.--Multimodalman 09:06, 27 March 2006 (PDT)

There's a bunch of historical and geographical info on the term Inland Empire in the book The Great Columbia Plain by D.W. Meinig. Some brief paraphrasing from there: Before the 1880s, Walla Walla was the focus of the inland region, the first area where wheat farming boomed, with relatively workable export transportation down the Columbia River. In the 1880s and 1890s, wheat farming spread and boomed in the Palouse region and Big Bend Country, while railroads appeared on the scene and quickly proliferated. These changes led to Spokane undergoing rapid growth and development. As a railroad hub, the city became the central node for not only the wheat regions but also the mining districts of Coeur d'Alene, the Kootenay region in Canada, and various other mining boom areas in Idaho, Montana, and British Columbia. Additionally, the timber of the Idaho panhandle was logged and routed through Spokane. The wheat regions were very short on lumber. The newspaper Spokane Falls Review wrote in 1883 of a "new" region, which Spokane would dominate, "known and suggestively spoken of as the Inland Empire." By 1890, it was not just a dream, and Spokane grew to the largest city within hundreds and hundreds of miles, east of the Cascades. The Spokane newspapers published news about "tributary cities". The common claim, made mainly by Spokane interests, was that the Inland Empire reached west to the Cascades and south to the Blue Mountains, north to the mining districts of Canada, and east to the mines of Montana. But not all of this region was wholly dominated by Spokane. To the east, the Bitterroot Mountains were a major barrier and the Montana mines beyond them had ties to Minneapolis and St Louis. While Spokane did dominate the Palouse and Big Bend regions, the Walla Walla Valley retained a degree of independence via its old trade links straight to Portland. The Lewiston and Camas Prairie districts of Idaho were also not wholly dominated. To the west, cities like Wenatchee had better links to Seattle than to Spokane, and the western parts of Big Bend Country, like the Waterville Plateau, had ties to Wenatchee at least as strong as those to Spokane. The Tri-Cities were also not wholly dominated, and in time grew to rival Spokane in some ways.

An interesting related issue is the attempt to great the new state of Lincoln, which came relatively close to actually happening, and was apparently more or less the same as the Inland Empire. Pfly 21:24, 8 January 2007 (UTC)