One of many pioneer entrepreneurs whose ambitions and enterprises reverberated throughout the West of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jay P. Graves (1860-1948) began modestly enough in hardware in Illinois and promoted himself into mining, transportation, and urban development in the Inland Empire of the Pacific Northwest. Lack of capital and relative obscurity slowed him only temporarily.

He parlayed acquaintance into support, involved in his schemes wealthy Canadian bankers and business executives and powerful American industrialists, and played mighty companies against one another.

A managerial interest in British Columbia mining projects grew to encompass the incipient Boundary mining district. Graves attracted Montreal investors, appealed to Canadian pride and fear of U.S. domination to entice a railroad into serving Boundary, and eventually built there what was, in its time, the largest copper smelter in the British Empire. The purchase of a bankrupt street railway launched Graves into two decades of urban development in Spokane, Washington.

Some of the finest homes and parks in the city owe their existence to Graves, who, together with a group of civic-minded business leaders determined to build a certain kind of city after the Great Fire of 1889, laid out parks and roads and residential areas along the routes of Graves's electric streetcar lines.

Graves was also the essential figure in the development of the Spokane and Inland Empire Railroad, a line begun as a lumber hauler between Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and Spokane, that became under Graves's direction a carrier of passengers and freight in the Spokane suburbs and south into the Palouse country of Washington and Idaho, snatching business from the Northern Pacific, which had long considered the area its own.

Unprepossessing in a gray suit, with a quiet manner, Graves was bold and calculating. Not as colorful or as compelling as his more famous counterparts, he had enormous impact on all that he touched. For those who know where to look, his stamp remains visible on Spokane, the Palouse, and interior British Columbia.

John Fahey presents here through the career of Jay P. Graves an impressionistic portrait of Spokane history and the history of mining, western entrepreneurialism, western railroads, electric railways, and urban development. Based on sources not previously mined for Inland Empire topics, Shaping Spokane is a complex narrative that reveals the colorful mosaic of people and schemes that shaped the inland Northwest.