page_title: Crab Creek
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Crab Creek / History
caption_attribution_description: Lower Crab Creek 8 miles above the confluence with the Columbia River looking east. Saddle Mountains to the right. Photo taken by uploader. All rights released. Williamborg 05:42, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
context_page_description: Crab Creek is a stream in the U.S. state of Washington. Named for the presence of crayfish, it is one of the few perennial streams in the Columbia Basin of central Washington, flowing from the northeastern Columbia River Plateau, roughly 5 km east of Reardan, west-southwest to empty into the Columbia River near the small town of Beverly. Its course exhibits many examples of the erosive powers of extremely large glacial Missoula Floods of the late Pleistocene, which scoured the region. In addition, Crab Creek and its region have been transformed by the large-scale irrigation of the Bureau of Reclamation's Columbia Basin Project, which has raised water table levels, significantly extending the length of Crab Creek and created new lakes and streams.
  Crab Creek is 163 miles long and drains a watershed in eastern Washington of 5,097 square miles. It is sometimes referred to as the "longest ephemeral stream in North America".
context_section_description: Since it is one of the few creeks in the region with reliable water, Spokane and Palouse Indians utilized the area along Crab Creek to gather roots and other food. A main Indian trail through the region followed the creek. Lt. Symons came past the mid-Crab Creek area while laying out the Military Wagon Road from Fort Walla Walla to Camp Chelan in 1879. The Old Wagon Road was established along the creek from Waterville, Washington to Ritzville, Washington in 1888.
  Prior to establishing irrigation, most of the areas along Upper Crab Creek were bunchgrass prairie, which was suited to range cattle and sheep. Crab Creek and tributary creeks provided water for the herds. Although a handful of ranchers ran herds, shipping their bunchgrass-fed beef to Montana by rail from towns like Sprague, settlement remained extremely sparse. One such example was George Lucas, an Irish emigrant, who was Adams County's first permanent white settler. He established a way-station and raised cattle and horses at Cow Creek along the road to Fort Colville in 1869.
  Lower Crab Creek provided the only available water in that shrub-steppe region and so became the nucleus of settlement. Ben and Sam Hutchinson built the first recorded cabin along Lower Crab Creek in 1884. Tom McManamon, a cattle rancher, arrived shortly thereafter, with the first homesteaders arriving in 1901 and the town of Othello being established in 1904.
  When the Bureau of Reclamation located district offices in Othello in 1947 and built the Columbia Irrigation Project, the nature of the until then sparsely populated country changed dramatically.
caption: Lower Crab Creek 8 miles (13 km) above the confluence with the Columbia River looking east. Saddle Mountains to the right.
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