Talk:Inland Northwest

message: I'm from western Montana and I've never heard the name "Inland Empire". It strikes me as a tourist slogan, can anyone confirm the term's use? Hyacinth 20:12, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry I never got back to you. I included those Montana counties because of evidence in the geographical dictionary, and Web evidence that some others, at least, considered far western Montana part of the region. Examples: http://www.aahaminlandempire.org/, http://visitmt.com/categories/moreinfo.asp?IDRRecordId=14180&SiteId=1, http://www.betterinvesting.org/chapter/inland/volunteers (these aren't the particular sources I used when I made the map, just ones I just now found on Google). So I picked the far western counties of Montana and the far northeastern ones of Oregon. --Lukobe 21:58, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: By the way, shouldn't this be merged with Inland Northwest? --Lukobe 22:02, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you very much! Well, im trying to define it's modern borders through cities and counties websites research. My investigation is based on your map so it was important to know the source. The other question deals with these terms. Are "Inland Empire" and "Inland Northwest" equal? Or Inland Empire is a kind of relic and Inland NW is just a way to emphasize its contrast to Pacific NW? I may be wrong. Thank you for your time. I hope my english is quite understandable.. --Boardpizza 02:25, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Your English is fine, and better than my Russian! I think the "Inland Empire" and the "Inland Northwest" are the same thing, and that the latter is just a more modern term, to get away from the negative connotations of "empire." (It wouldn't be in contrast to "Pacific Northwest," because Eastern Washington and northeastern Oregon are unquestionably part of the Pacific Northwest, and the Idaho Panhandle is often considered part of the PNW too. --Lukobe 03:49, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: I'm curious -- who determined the rather exact boundaries of the region? This is very rare among U.S. regions that include parts of more than one state. Is there some sort of regional commission or board? How did individual counties get included or excluded? If there's a central authority of any sort, it should be included in the article. (What I'm really hoping here is that the exact boundaries were not created by a Wikipedia editor, which would raise a no original research issue.) MCB  00:22, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Out here in the West, we've got things known as "mountain ranges".  They're pretty effective at determining boundaries.  Western Washington is considered to run from the Pacific ocean to the Cascade Mountains -- and guess what?  The eastern borders of the counties making up Western Washington run along the ridgeline of the Cascades.  The Inland Northwest is usually considered to be bounded by the Cascade Mountains in Washington and the Bitterroot Mountains separating Idaho and Montana.  Since the county borders also follow these lines, it's possible to have very precise borders on a map. --Carnildo 20:13, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Exact boundaries? 

message: Does anybody know the source/meaning of the name? It's rather confusing to me, who's never been out there. --Dd42 17:59, 3 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: *See discussion below, "Inland Empire investigation" for detailed response, but look up "Empire Builder" Jim Hill. 
His railways opened up & connected his rich "Inland Empire" here (a.k.a. the Inland NW) with the rest of the nation in the 19th century. 
Amtrak's "Empire Builder" line still runs through the region partially along the route of his railways.
The title "Inland Empire" was in no small part due to the vast natural resources in the region that in turn spawned several economic empires & helped create several titans of commerce that would rival even Morgan, Cargenie & the Vanderbilt's. 
In fact, some of the biggest winners of the mining lottery (see Silver Valley, ID) would later summer in Newport & tour Europe with the most influential & wealthiest families of the day, as well as hobnob & even marry into royalty in a couple cases (hence a couple of the blue-blood power-families that still call the region home & still wield more political influence behind closed doors than should ever be tolerated or permitted in a healthy democracy... but that's best left for another article=). With wealth also comes crime and Spokane also 'boasted' among other things, a speakeasy owned & operated for a time by none other than Bugsy Malone (drawn by the money to be had & a love interest here at the time) who would later go on to bigger & better things including establishing a certain (in)famous city in NV.
The amount of wealth (legal & illicit) that was extracted and passed through the region's unofficial capital (Spokane) was so great that the afterglow remains to this day: the large & impressive castle-like courthouse overlooking the city of Spokane, based on several French and German castles; the "skyscrapers"(of the day)-monuments to wealth from the mining era still looking down on the downtown area, one even capped with an extravagant stair-step villa based on a European villa recreated using nearly all imported materials of the finest quality for its royal residents here. 
The wealth was so significant it created a boomtown that never busted and instead developed into basically a self sustaining economy, continued to grow long after the mines closed, trees were gone, and the flour & lumber mills went by way of. 
For those actually from here, the region is the "Inland Empire" with "Inland Northwest" being politely tolerated but usually used only by newcomers &/or those trying to be politically correct (or not confuse Californian transplants who may associate it with their more recently christened "Inland Empire" in their central valley). 
People from the Inland Empire generally do not usually associate ourselves with "Pacific Northwest", least of all "Pacific Inland Northwest" since Pacific NW is VERY closely associated with just the coast (west of the Cascades) & coastal living. 
This is an entirely different world this side (east) of the Cascades with respect to climate and culture alike (in fact it'd be hard to find climates so vastly different, not to mention a fairly tree-hugging, liberal westside politically dominating a generally very conservative eastern 2/3rds of the state), all resulting in a mild tension between the two unequal parts of the state. The coast/westsiders tend to be generally ambivalent at best towards the eastern 2/3rds of the state & the eastern 2/3rds often feel its regarded as little more than a source of tax funds, but otherwise ignored if not outright disregarded by those on the other side of the Cascade Range. This tension doesn't run all that deep, but is a very real tension that exists. 
The "Inland Northwest" for many born & raised here is a separate & distinct region & culture from anything to do with "Pacific Northwest". It would be analogous to some outsider calling Montana part of the Pacific NW - yeah from the perspective of NYC or Boston it's in the NW corner of the country, but for those from Montana I know they regard it to be firmly a Mountain State with strong pioneering roots still just under the surface (but I'll leave that to a Montanan to confirm). I mean in all my life, I've never once heard any part of Montana called a part of the "Inland Empire" or even "Inland Northwest". I mean yeah, they get Spokane news programs and Spokane news used to always talk "Inland Empire" (until the recent Californian invasion resulted in the sudden shift to "Inland Northwest" - money corrupts all after all & can buy anything even forced name changes, but I digress). 
Bottom-line, this article needs a lot of work as it doesn't do the region justice. InlandEmpireNative 05:39, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Source? 

message: What is the purpose or reasoning of this article? I've never heard of the Inland Empire, and wonder why this is even here. The only thing I can find on the PNW Inland Empire is a history book. Ryoga-2003 (talk) 02:32, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Where are you from? I'm not surprised if you haven't heard of it if you're not from around the Pacific Northwest. --76.104.196.236 (talk) 07:41, 12 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Purpose? 

message: Research Theodore Wilcox and the Portland Flouring Mills Company. The development of Pacific rim trade. He made an "Inland Empire" of wheat production out of the inland region able to grow dryland wheat encompassing northeastern Oregon, eastern Washington and Northern Idaho in the early 20th century to feed this trade by driving the local community flour mills out of business and creating a captive market. The name stuck.
66.119.193.155 (talk) 21:42, 30 August 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  why it is "Inland Empire" 

message: Just calling it like it is. I'm sure the Census Bureau is fine at counting people, but as the apparent sole justification for everything on this page, I'm not convinced that this is a worthwhile super-region to even speak of. Nobody's seen fit to bolster this article with additional scholarship in two years since the warning was added in 2019, and as a long-time Yakima resident I don't feel that we have anything in common with Spokane, the supposed regional hub, at all. Our local news media have been consolidated in the Tri-Cities: Richland, Pasco & Kennewick. It might look like the same sort of place to the government paper-pushers in DC and I suppose it must look like the center of the universe to anyplace within an hour's drive of them, but Spokane may as well be Chicago for all anyone here gives a care.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:6C54:4500:4C1:65B6:AA79:1785:94BA (talk) 06:38, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Single Source: "Census Bureau" Out Of Touch With Reality 

message: I check pages listed in :Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of :Inland Northwest's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.
Reference named "Fox":
From Spokane, Washington: 
From History of Spokane, Washington: 
From Polynesia: 
I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT⚡ 08:42, 17 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Orphaned references in [[:Inland Northwest]]