The haze of heat seemed like a pall of thin smoke from distant forest fires.  The sun rose, a great, pale-red ball, hot at sunrise, and it soared blazing-white at noon, to burn slowly westward through a cloudless, coppery sky, at last to set sullen and crimson over the ranges.

Spokane, being the only center of iron, steel, brick, and masonry in this area, resembled a city of furnaces.  Business was slack.  The asphalt of the streets left clean imprints of a pedestrian’s feet; bits of newspaper stuck fast to the hot tar.  Down by the gorge, where the great green river made its magnificent plunges over the falls, people congregated, tarried, and were loath to leave, for here the blowing mist and the air set into motion by the falling water created a temperature that was relief.

Citizens talked of the protracted hot spell, of the blasted crops, of an almost sure disaster to the wheat-fields, and of the activities of the I.W.W.  Even the war, for the time being, gave place to the nearer calamities impending.

Montana had taken drastic measures against the invading I.W.W.  The Governor of Idaho had sent word to the camps of the organization that they had five days to leave that state.  Spokane was awakening to the menace of hordes of strange, idle men who came in on the westbound freight-trains.  The railroads had been unable to handle the situation.  They were being hard put to it to run trains at all.  The train crews that refused to join the I.W.W. had been threatened, beaten, shot at, and otherwise intimidated.

The Chamber of Commerce sent an imperative appeal to representative wheat-raisers, ranchers, lumbermen, farmers, and bade them come to Spokane to discuss the situation.  They met at the Hotel Davenport, where luncheon was served in one of the magnificently appointed dining-halls of that most splendid hotel in the West.

The lion of this group of Spokane capitalists was Riesinberg, a man of German forebears, but all American in his sympathies, with a son already in the army.  Riesinberg was president of a city bank and of the Chamber of Commerce.  His first words to the large assembly of clean-cut, square-jawed, intent-eyed Westerners were:  “Gentlemen, we are here to discuss the most threatening and unfortunate situation the Northwest was ever called upon to meet.”  His address was not long, but it was stirring.  The Chamber of Commerce could provide unlimited means, could influence and control the state government; but it was from the visitors invited to this meeting, the men of the outlying districts which were threatened, that objective proofs must come and the best methods of procedure.

The first facts to come out were that many crops were ruined already, but, owing to the increased acreage that year, a fair yield was expected; that wheat in the Bend would be a failure, though some farmers here and there would harvest well; that the lumber districts were not operating, on account of the I.W.W.