From the quiet water at Black Bay, the Spokane River runs west past the falls at Post Falls and on toward Spokane, and for a long stretch of the nineteenth century there was exactly one dependable way to get a wagon across it. That crossing sat at a horseshoe-shaped ford in the Spokane Valley, a place area tribes had used for generations. Downstream from Black Bay, the river that begins at Lake Coeur d'Alene was not just scenery. It was a barrier, and the man who first turned crossing it into a business was Antoine Plante.
Plante was a former Hudson's Bay Company employee, a French Canadian and Gros Ventre man born around 1810 who knew the Spokane country from his years as a fur trapper. In 1853 he guided the survey expedition escorting Isaac Stevens, the first governor of Washington Territory, from Fort Benton toward Olympia. The survey crews, remembered as the Spokane Invincibles and Stevens' Guards, were scouting routes for wagon trails and railroads, and they decided a new road would pass through the old ford. Plante saw what was coming. He returned to the fording spot at once, settled there in 1854, and established a cable ferry, the first ferry crossing on the Spokane River.
The timing served him well. Both the Mullan Road and the Colville Road, built for settlement and military transportation, routed their traffic over Plante's Ferry, giving him a steady stream of customers until 1866. He charged accordingly for the only safe crossing in the area: four dollars for a wagon with two animals, and fifty cents for each additional animal. Spokane Historical also credits Plante with planting the first apple orchard in the valley, a beginning for a fruit-growing country that would become famous across the state.
The ferry era ended when the first bridge spanning the Spokane River was built a few miles upstream in 1866, taking the road traffic with it. Plante moved to northwestern Montana in 1876 and died there in 1890. His crossing, though, was not forgotten. In the 1920s, Spokane Valley historian Seth Woodard uncovered the remnants of the posts used for the ferry's cable tow, and in 1938 Woodard and the Spokane County Pioneer Society erected a monument of about 24,000 pounds beside Upriver Drive, at the very spot where he had found the cable post.
In 1952 Spokane County created Plante's Ferry Park on the ground, now home to one of the area's largest sports complexes. Families from Black Bay who drive west along the river today pass a crossing that wagons once paid four dollars to use. Long before the bridges at Post Falls, the dams, and the highways, the whole valley's travel narrowed to one cable, one ferry, and one well-chosen ford on the Spokane River.
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