Our first grant application as a Preserve America Community has been FedExed to Washington DC. Here is a summary of the proposal. If you want to see the actual document, contact me directly.
Crossroads on the Columbia
For over 9000 years, Native People gathered at Kettle Falls on the Columbia to fish, trade, govern and celebrate nature's bounty. This natural crossroads attracted David Thompson and the Northwest Company in July of 1811. British, Scottish and Eastern Native people brought new transportation, new goods and international trade to this cultural Mecca. The declaration of the International Boundary in 1846 brought more structure and strife to the crossroads as the boundary survey parties, British and American, Chinese miners, homesteaders, military and commercial enterprises pursued their interests, often at the expense of the native people. Each of these groups tried to adapt to the others as best they could. There were good and bad actors on every side. National and civil wars rippled into these far corners. Pinkney City, near Colville, was once the county seat of an area that included most of Eastern Washington, all of Idaho and parts of Montana and Wyoming. For the most part mainstream commerce shifted to the south as railroads cut across the Columbia Basin to the Pacific Coast while many of these early settlements sank beneath the waters of Lake Roosevelt. With that same shift, accounts of our history have been sidelined from major historical works.
Our museums, collections of private citizens, libraries and living memories hold the lessons of those days but like those early towns, the they are in jeopardy of being lost. The objectives of this grant are 1) to preserve digital copies of those documents, pictures and artifacts, 2) to share those stories between researchers and the public via the Internet, 3) support our local museums and 4) organize the materials we have into themes that can be used for auto tours, books, media and other interpretation to attract heritage tourism.
This is a tedious process that involves scanning, photographing and recording thousands of digital files, attaching metadata information about the people, places, times and events recorded in those files, posting them into Internet systems and tying them to key words that make them searchable. In this process we have already begun assembling a corps of "History Detectives" who are willing to help recapture our cultural heritage by working with this information. Stevens County gained designation as a Preserve America Community in 2007. This grant would assure a rich, accessible body of knowledge from which to interpret our cultural resources and share them with the world in a self-sustaining public-private partnership.