Is it time for Cheney to change its name?

I can still remember the cold winter day when my wife and I first saw Cheney. We had driven up from Portland in the late ‘80s for a job interview, and I recall that in the last 100 miles we had passed through a very dry and desolate country. I now know what a wonderful, unique place the channeled scablands are, but at the time it seemed only to be a lot of nothing all the way from the Tri-Cities north to the Spokane County line.

It was when a line of pine trees appeared on the northern horizon near the exit for Fishtrap Lake that we saw the Cheney exit sign and wondered if this university town would turn out to be a green and tree-lined oasis, as we had pictured. About the same time, we began to wonder about the name “Cheney;” where it had come from and how was it pronounced.

Some of our friends from Portland had pronounced it with the long “A” sound, like the actor Lon Chaney. Others got the pronunciation correct, but couldn’t resist rhyming it with words like “teeny” and “weenie,” at the same time warning us that we’d never survive life in such a small place, after living in Portland.

Not long after settling in, I began to do some research and discovered the city had originally been known as Willow Springs, named during the 1870s for a small grove of willows and some bubbling springs a little ways behind the current site of ADM Milling. The romantic in me immediately pictured a sort of idyllic “Little House on the Prairie” type town, and I began wishing that the place where I now lived had kept its original name.

Towns changed names quite frequently back in those days, and the same would be true with Willow Springs, which later became Depot Springs because a railroad depot had been built by the willows and springs. Then, to honor Frederick Billings, president of the Northern Pacific Railroad Company, Depot Springs was renamed Billings. (Of interest is the fact that our Billings was named before that other Billings in Montana).

In 1880, the name was changed again, this time to honor railroad tycoon and industrialist Benjamin P. Cheney. Some say he was honored by the town’s name after he had given $10,000 to build a Normal School, which eventually became Eastern Washington University. However, the city was named for Mr. Cheney before he donated the money, which suggests that putting the cart before the horse is sometimes a good idea. Cheney (the man) came to Cheney (the city) in 1883, to visit the town and school that bore his name. The successful event was written about in newspapers as far away as Portland, Ore.

Other towns and places in the Inland Northwest have also been named after people. Sprague was named for former American Civil War Union general John Wilson Sprague. Spangle was named after pioneer Frank Spangle and Ritzville was named for Philip Ritz, who had settled the area in 1878. One of the most visited places near Cheney, Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge, was named after Cyrus Turnbull, who lived in the area for about six years.

Though he called himself a farmer, Cyrus had no better luck growing crops in the rocky scabland soil than other farmers here. Mainly, he derived his income through hunting. Although there were no signs back then announcing this to be a national wildlife preserve, the deer, elk, moose, duck and geese came there anyway. And old Cyrus set about tapping this resource and providing all types of meat for the citizens of Cheney (presumably without the aid of foam trays and plastic wrap.) These supplies of fresh meat may have helped many Cheney citizens make it through the hard winters of that period.

During the last few decades, there have been a few token efforts by some folks to change the name of Cheney back to Willow Springs. Unfortunately, the cost of replacing all that stationery and repainting the highway signs has made this impractical. It would also call for planting some more willows and replenishing the springs, so it’s likely that Cheney will always keep its current name.

Even so, a part of me sometimes dreams of driving home on State Highway 904 from the south, seeing those first groves of trees, the lush ponds and meadows, and then spotting a highway sign that used to read “Entering Cheney,” but in my dream, now warmly reads, “Welcome to Cyrus.”

John Soennichsen is a Cheney-area resident. He has written numerous columns, short stories and books including non-fiction works “Bretz’s Flood,” “Live from Death Valley,” and “The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882,” along with the historical fiction novel “Westward Journey” and the murder-mystery “The Fat Detective” set in Spokane.