Manito Park Zoo

SPOTLIGHT ON THE SPOKANE REGION

By Kris Krell

Manito Park Zoo

Spring is on the way! The calendar tells me it is!  It’s March 1 on Friday!   I know it’s hard to believe with the weather we have been having.  Normally, our winters are usually over by mid-February—sometimes a small dusting of snow would happen on an early morning in late February or early March, but that bit of snow would be gone within a few hours.  I am ready for this cold, snowy weather to be over, and I’m sure that most of the people in the Spokane area are ready for it to be over too! 

Springtime makes me think about parks!  We walk our two dogs at the many pretty parks in Spokane and the Valley.  We’re ready to get out and walk through our beautiful parks again!

For years, when I’ve driven by Manito Park on Grand Boulevard, I’ve noticed the trough in the parking strip beside the street.  I’ve never stopped to see if the marker gives any facts about why the trough is there, but I’ve searched online for information to no avail.  

Last week, researching for that post, I found the answer!  The concrete trough in the parking strip is the actual horse trough installed in 1907 for the stagecoach horse teams traveling up the Grand Boulevard hill to water their horses! That makes total sense now as I always wondered what is a water trough doing on Grand Boulevard!  Until last week, I didn’t know that stagecoaches had ridden through Spokane!

I thought the only zoo in Spokane was the Walk In The Wild Zoo in the Spokane Valley.  Much to my amazement, I discovered last summer while looking for ideas to write about for the EWGS Blog, that Manito Park also had a zoo!

Montrose Park, 95 acres of land, was donated to the City of Spokane on May 19, 1904.  Montrose Park was renamed to Manito Park.  Manito, according to Manito Park’s brochure,  “A Walking Tour of Manito Park” is a Native American word meaning “a supernatural force that pervades nature.”

The Manito Park Zoo was the main centerpiece of the park from 1905 to 1933—created out of about a third of the donated land or 30 acres. The goal of the zoo was to display animals that were not native to the Spokane area believing that would generate more interest in the zoo.  

Some of the animals on display were:  crow, owl, elk, deer, buffalo, kangaroo, muskrat, beaver, monkeys, coyote, emu, ostrich, pheasant, fox, racoon, bobcat, cougar, pigeons, ducks, a golden eagle, and brown, black, grizzly, and polar bears as well as ducks, geese, and other birds.  Another area near Rose Hill were small cages that kept skunk, coyote, bobcat.   

The rock building that today houses The Park Bench Café, was the Peanut Shack during the zoo’s time.  Zoo visitors could buy food and drink for themselves as well as peanuts for the monkeys.  

As the news of the Manito Zoo spread, Tacoma, Washington, gave the zoo a mature bull elk—Old Preach.  So that Old Preach wasn’t friendless, a roommate was provided in a young billy goat called Billy. Billy the goat chewed tobacco “like a thresher hand”, and Old Preach picked up the habit.  Old Preach frequently tried to mooch tobacco from visitors.  A pair of grizzly bears came from Yellowstone National Park, Glacier Park provided six elk, three bucks, and three does. Kansas sent four buffalo.  In 1913, the first baby elk was born—his mother was from Yellowstone.  His name was PowWow the First.  In 1916, the first baby buffalo was born.  The polar bears came by way of  a discharged soldier from Tacoma who had brought home with him two baby polar bear cubs.  They soon were too large for him to handle; his parents put them up for sale, and Manito Park bought them for the zoo.

Funny animal antics aside, there were also some devastating incidents between certain animals on several hot summer days over several years. I’ll leave it up to you to look those incidents up if you have an interest.  

Part of the cause of the demise of the zoo was also that the zoo was in a wealthy part of Spokane, the stench and noise of the zoo caused concern among the neighborhood, and sometimes there were animal escapes.

The Zoo struggled for a few years, and in 1933, the decision was made to finally close the zoo.  The major reason was because of the 1929 financial crash and its effect on the Spokane economy that caused financial difficulties with the zoo.  Homes were found for a majority of the animals.  On January 8, 1933, the zoo officially closed.

Sources:  Spokane History Timeline; The Spokesman-Review, Demise of Spokane’s Manito zoo marked by shots of a .30-.30 rifle, June 24, 2018, City of Spokane, Manito Park; Manito Park's brochure, "A Walking Tour of Manito Park