Long before it was a town, before it had any name at all, the ground where Reardan now stands lay in the heart of the Spokane Tribe’s homeland. The site sits roughly fourteen miles south of the tribe’s traditional salmon camp at the Little Falls of the Spokane River, on or near the network of trails that carried people between camps east and west across the plateau.¹

The reason people stopped here is the same reason travelers still pull over today: water, in a dry land. The big pond and wetlands on the north edge of the future town, now Reardan Audubon Lake, drew waterfowl in clouds, and with them people gathering roots, berries, and eggs on hunting and gathering grounds used for millennia.¹ Well into the settlement era, Spokane Tribe families still pitched tepees on the eastern outskirts of town for a few weeks at a time, drying fruit obtained from local farms as they traveled to and from the reservation established across the river directly north.²

White settlers began arriving in the late 1870s and early 1880s: cattlemen and farmers drawn by the prolific bunchgrass and the green meadows along Crab Creek. Among the earliest nearby families were those of William H. Childs (1856-1928) and Henry Harder (1841-1924), and the first settler to live on the present site of Reardan was John Wickham (1844-1925).¹

Reardan’s first incarnation was not Reardan. In 1882, two Cheney men, William F. Hooker and John W. Still, convinced that a townsite midway between Spokane and Davenport had a bright future, platted a town on land in the southeastern quarter of today’s Reardan, east of Aspen Street and south of Columbia Avenue, and named it Fairweather.¹ It briefly had a store, a hotel, and a blacksmith shop. It never took hold. A traveler passing through in 1887 recorded a blunt verdict.

By then only one of Fairweather’s five buildings was still occupied.¹ The hamlet’s fate might have been permanent, one more vanished plat on the Big Bend prairie, had a railroad not changed everything two years later.

In 1889 the locomotives of the newly built Central Washington Railway, a spur of the Northern Pacific, first whistled into town on the line running from Cheney to Davenport and beyond.¹ The name emblazoned on the new depot was not Fairweather. It was Reardan, honoring Charles Fairfax Reardan (1854-1914), the line’s esteemed chief construction engineer. The Spokane Falls Review first called the town Reardan in print on July 3, 1889, and the name stuck.¹

There is no evidence Charles Reardan ever lived in the town that bears his name. Yet the honor plainly mattered to him. Years later his widow put it in a letter the town’s newspaper published.

For a short while the settlement answered to yet another name. When J. S. Capps moved his ranch post office into the new townsite in 1889, the place was briefly known as Capps, until the postal service switched the name to Reardan to match the depot.¹ A flurry of building followed. Rail agent C. A. Pearce built his family a house that year, remembered as the first home in town. August M. Olson hauled his stock over from the dying Fairweather site and opened a store; James Brand opened a second general store that fall, A. W. Childs a drugstore, and A. Lutzhoft an implement business.¹

Growth came in fits. The nationwide Panic of 1893 stalled the young town, which depended entirely on its agricultural resources; that July a Reardan correspondent reported that local grain buyers were declining to buy wheat at any price, there being no export market at all.⁴ But the farms rebounded, and by the late 1890s, in Steele and Rose’s phrase, “Reardan came rapidly to the front.”¹ The year 1899 was reckoned the most prosperous in the town’s short life: a successful school bond had brought an elementary and high school, and the town’s first bank, the Reardan Exchange Bank, opened its doors.¹

Above all, there was the mill. The Washington Grain & Milling Company’s new flouring mill, with its towering smokestack, became the symbol of Reardan’s prosperity. Within three years it was turning out 400 barrels of flour a day and meeting a yearly payroll of $12,000, boasting that wheat grown practically at the mill door made the best grades in the region.⁵ The mill so dominated town life that it fielded its own baseball team, the Reardan Swing Sifters. The town also boasted an all-woman team, the Reardan Oriole Club, which in the spring of 1903 played the men and, to the spectators’ surprise, lost by a single run, 6 to 5.⁶

By 1902 the county assessor put Reardan’s population at 382, a showing that greatly encouraged the friends of incorporation.¹ On April 4, 1903, the town voted to incorporate, 68 in favor to 34 against, and Reardan became an incorporated town of the fourth class, the smallest class Washington law allowed. Michael F. Moriarty (1857-1911), president of the flour mill, was elected its first mayor; the state made it official that April 14.⁷ That summer the town’s brand-new newspaper, the Reardan Gazette, took inventory of a remarkably complete little city: five general stores, five grain warehouses, three churches, three saloons, three blacksmiths, two lumber yards, two livery stables, a bank, a jewelry store, a millinery, an opera-style auditorium, two doctors, one lawyer, and a citizen-owned park with a ball ground and grandstand, which the Gazette called the town’s “breathing space.”¹

Steele and Rose put the population near 600 by 1904. The first official federal count, in 1910, found 527, swelled in those years by construction crews: when the Little Falls dam rose on the Spokane River, nearly all its materials were shipped by rail to Reardan and freighted the final thirteen miles by wagon.⁸ By 1912 some estimates ran as high as 900 residents. No one knew it then, but that would stand as Reardan’s high-water mark for more than a century.¹

In 1904, Steele and Rose had noted one point of pride: unlike most towns in the district, Reardan had never been set back by a serious conflagration.¹ It would not stay that way. On August 19, 1913, a fire spread from a downtown livery stable and destroyed, with a single exception, every building on the block: the hotel, barbershop, telephone office, laundry, saloon, undertaking parlor, and rooming house.⁹ A town history written by Reardan High School students in 1959 marked it bluntly as the year things began to go downhill. Reardan rebuilt, but the momentum was gone; the 1920 census counted 420 residents, more than a hundred fewer than in 1910.¹

A second devastating fire swept the business district on the morning of August 3, 1926. Amy Shipman, the town’s telephone operator, was asleep in her mother’s hotel when she woke to flames and ran in her night clothes to the switchboard to sound the alarm, but the fire was already well under way. It consumed the Bowie Building, a general store, a drugstore, and the hotel she had been sleeping in, with losses of $40,000 to $50,000. The cause was never determined, though it was widely believed someone had set it deliberately.¹⁰

Through the hard decades the mill kept running, passing eventually to the Centennial Flouring Mills Company, and the town held together, buoyed by its own traditions. Chief among them was Mule Days, begun by John W. Mann in 1904 as a focal point for baseball games, carnivals, parades, and mule pulls.¹² Mules were serious business here: before combines and tractors they powered the wheat harvest, farmers prided themselves on handling them, and the grand parade sometimes featured twenty-mule teams. As the town’s own historians later put it, the purpose of the day was never primarily money-making, but good fellowship.² Renamed Reardan Community Days in 1943 and later restored to Mule Days in a nod to nostalgia, the celebration still fills the town on the first Saturday of every June, now more than 120 years on.²

Many from Reardan served in the Second World War, and one gave everything. Joe Eugene Mann (1922-1944), the fifth of nine children raised on a farm outside town, had hoped to be a pilot; an old football injury from his Reardan High days, a broken collarbone, disqualified him, so he volunteered for the paratroops instead. A hernia suffered in a training jump kept him out of the D-Day drop, a fact that reportedly gnawed at him. He got his chance in Operation Market Garden, jumping into the Netherlands on September 17, 1944, as a scout with the 502nd Parachute Infantry, 101st Airborne.¹³

Near the town of Best the next day, Mann crawled to an exposed position with a rocket launcher and destroyed an 88 mm gun and an ammunition dump, fighting on until he had been wounded four times, a bullet through each shoulder and arm. With both arms bandaged to his body, he insisted on standing watch through the night. When the German counterattack came on the morning of September 19 and a grenade dropped into his trench among his comrades, Mann could not throw it back. He did the only thing left.

Private First Class Joe E. Mann was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor on August 30, 1945. The medal itself now rests in a memorial in the Reardan Town Hall, beside the town’s Memorial Library.^13,14

By mid-century Reardan had settled into the pattern of many wheat towns: smaller, but stubborn. On the frigid night of January 10, 1952, the town’s most historic landmark burned when fire took the old Centennial Flouring Mills grain elevator and warehouse, a $120,000 loss; most of the town’s 420 residents braved the cold to stand and watch it go.¹⁶ Four years later, longtime residents Mary B. Driscoll and Katherine C. Tramm wrote a warm history of the town for The Spokesman-Review, describing a skyline now crowned by the six storage bins of the Reardan Grain Growers and explaining the arithmetic of rural decline: as the ranches grew larger, they became fewer. And yet, they noted, in most cases descendants of the pioneer ranchers still farmed the land.²

The schools consolidated and modernized: a new grade school opened in 1953, and by 1956 the district’s ten bus routes were carrying 235 students from 127 families across 735 miles of wheat country every single day.² In 1961, the area gained new neighbors when a Hutterite colony, a communal Anabaptist farming settlement, was established nearby, adding another thread to the region’s agricultural fabric.³ The town’s population slid to 389 by 1970, its lowest since incorporation, but what Reardan lacked in numbers it made up in spirit, much of it channeled through the schools. The basketball teams became a genuine dynasty: the boys took State 2B championships in 1966, 1967, 1970, 1971, 1974, and 1982, and the girls in 1985, 1988, 2011, 2012, and 2013.¹

When the town built a new recreation complex in 1974, with a lighted football field, two softball fields, five lighted tennis courts, and an eight-lane track, much of the labor was volunteered.

In the end, geography rescued the town that geography had nearly stranded. Reardan lies only about 23 miles from Spokane and 11 from Fairchild Air Force Base, one of the region’s largest employers.¹ In the town’s early decades, getting to the city meant riding the train to Cheney and catching a trolley the rest of the way. Then in the 1910s and 1920s the automobile route known as the Sunset Highway, today’s U.S. Highway 2, was improved and paved straight through town along Broadway Avenue. By the 1970s dozens of residents were commuting to jobs at the base, in Airway Heights, and in Spokane.¹

The census confirmed it. After nearly a century of standing still, Reardan grew: 498 residents in 1980, 608 by 2000, and 637 by 2020, within sight of its historic peak.¹ A community that had once feared following Fairweather into oblivion had, instead, quietly endured.

Reardan’s most famous figure arrived not as a founder but as a transfer student. The author Sherman Alexie (b. 1966), a standout Reardan High basketball player in the 1980s, went on to international literary fame, and made the town central to his 2007 novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, winner of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. The semi-autobiographical story turns on a Spokane Indian boy’s decision to leave his reservation school in Wellpinit and enroll at Reardan, a place the narrator sizes up with equal parts resentment and admiration: a rich farm town in the wheat, but also home to one of the best small schools in the state.¹⁷ Alexie dedicated the book to “Wellpinit and Reardan, my hometowns.”¹⁷

In the twenty-first century, the two things that most draw visitors to Reardan are, fittingly, the oldest thing about the place and the very reason for its founding: the water and the railroad. In 2003 the private land around the birding pond went up for sale, and the Inland Northwest Land Conservancy, working with local Audubon chapters and the Reardan Chamber of Commerce, purchased the 227-acre parcel, selling it at cost to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife in 2006. Volunteers, including the Reardan Lions Club, added blinds, spotting scopes, paved trails, and a restroom, so that birders no longer risked their lives on the highway shoulder to watch the swans.¹⁸

Then in 2016 the Inland Northwest Rail Museum moved from Spokane onto a parcel two miles west of town, where visitors climb through locomotives and cabooses and ride a short narrow-gauge train wryly dubbed the “Reardan Rocket.”¹ It is a fitting institution for a town that owes its existence to a rail line. The original Central Washington Railway tracks still run through the middle of Reardan, operated today as the Washington Eastern Railroad on its route from Cheney toward Coulee City, and the skyline is still crowned by the grain elevators that have defined it for more than a century.^1,3

Travelers still stop at the ponds and wetlands, just as people have for thousands of years. Only now, as the historian Jim Kershner observed, they come equipped with binoculars.¹