Bridges over Kettle Falls

  Kettle Falls was not only important as a fishing spot.  The Kettle River, Columbia and Colville River all come together near the falls.  In an era when boats were the principle means of transportation, this made Kettle Falls a natural hub for commerce.  When the Paiute Indians brought the first Spanish ponies to the area around 1760, commerce and transportation changed forever.  The historic routes traveled by natives to the falls expanded to connect to Celilo Falls, the other major fishing falls on the Columbia River, and the Bitterroot Valley in Montana. Fur traders brought their canoe technologies for making large shipping canoes.  As settlers arrived, mining and fruit production increased,  steamboats came nearly all the way to the falls, stopping below Rickey Rapids.
  As traffic increased on the area now inundated behind Grand Coulee Dam, as many as 14 ferries were used to supply settlements on either side of the Columbia.  Two free ferries still operate at Keller and Gifford along Lake Roosevelt.  Eventually a suspension bridge was built across the Columbia at Kettle Falls.    By 1926 with the general use of automobiles, a bigger bridge was necessary.  A steel bridge for cars was constructed below today's bridge.  The buttress for that bridge was 120 feet above the native river surface.  Grand Coulee Dam would have drowned most of the old bridge.  So before the dam was finished, in 1939 a new bridge was built that is in use today.  There were also railroad bridges at Marcus and Northport that early cars would use to cross the river - after carefully checking the train schedule.