From the shore at Black Bay, the Spokane River points west toward Spokane, but in the early 1900s the newest promise in this country pointed north. In 1905, railroad builder Daniel Chase Corbin formed the Spokane International Railway, a line meant to run about 140 miles from Spokane to Eastport, Idaho, on the Canadian border. For families around Post Falls, it meant their corner of Kootenai County was no longer just on the way to somewhere else. It was part of a route to Canada.
Corbin was a familiar name here. His earlier Spokane Falls and Idaho branch had first brought trains through this area in 1886. This time he built with Canadian Pacific backing. Canadian Pacific agreed to fund much of the construction and to secure the loan by holding the new line's bonds. Crews graded and built northward in 1905, including at a construction camp near Eastport that is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and also known as the Chinese Ovens site. The railroad became operational in 1906.
The prize was bigger than one border crossing. At Eastport the line met Canadian Pacific at Kingsgate, British Columbia. Canadian Pacific also controlled the Soo Line, with connections to Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Chicago. Completing the Spokane International therefore let Canadian Pacific compete with the Northern Pacific and Great Northern for traffic between the Midwest and the Puget Sound country. Express passenger service soon followed on the line, offered as the Soo-Spokane Train De Luxe.
Northbound trains rolled across the Rathdrum Prairie and on through Athol, Sandpoint and Bonners Ferry on their way to the border. The railroad also touched wartime North Idaho: in 1940, two Ohio Match Company locomotives were sold to the United States Navy to help construct a spur off the Spokane International for building the Farragut naval base in Farragut, Idaho. The locomotives were scrapped for war materials in 1944.
The hard years changed the company's name, but not its route. After financial difficulties and receivership during the Great Depression, the line was reorganized on October 1, 1941, and renamed the Spokane International Railroad. By the end of 1960 it reported freight traffic only, with no passengers. Union Pacific took control on October 6, 1958, began operating it as a subsidiary on January 1, 1959, and formally merged it into its own structure on December 31, 1987.
The name disappeared, but the railroad did not. The line remains in operation today as Union Pacific's Spokane Subdivision, still described as an important connection between southern British Columbia and the northwest United States. So when a freight train crosses the prairie north of Black Bay, it is following an idea Corbin sold in 1905: that a small border crossing at Eastport could link the Spokane country, and the mill towns along the Spokane River, to Chicago, Canada and the Pacific.
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