Long before a highway hugged its shore, Lake Pend Oreille was the road into this country. In 1866 the Oregon Steam Navigation Company launched the steamer Mary Moody on the lake, and she became its first official mail carrier, helping travelers push north toward newly discovered gold fields. For years afterward, steamboats were how people, mail and supplies moved here, linking little landings around the lake and up the Clark Fork River, while the forested shoreline around present-day Sandpoint was still quiet and sparsely settled.
Northern Pacific changed that scale almost overnight. The railroad began laying track through the panhandle in 1881, and Lake Pend Oreille was its hardest obstacle. That spring, Robinson Weeks arrived from California with his sons Burt and Asa and set up a sawmill at the north end of the planned crossing, cutting ties and timbers for the trestle and using a steamboat to tow logs across the lake. Their gamble paid off when the 8,400-foot wooden trestle between Sandpoint and the south shore opened on March 4, 1882, completing a rail link that ended the region's isolation.
A town grew up along the tracks, at first on the railroad's own right-of-way, with stores, saloons and lodging for weary travelers. But the lake kept testing the railroad. In the flood of 1894, water rose over the wooden trestle and threatened to float it away, so workers parked flatcars loaded with rock on it to hold it down. The lesson stuck. The replacement bridge finished in 1904 sat higher, ran on 83 cement piers with steel spans, and included a swing section so steamboats could still pass. For a while, the iron horse and the steamboat shared the same crossing, each carrying the panhandle's timber and people to market.
Sandpoint did not stay a one-railroad town. The Great Northern arrived about a decade behind Northern Pacific, following the Kootenai River through Bonners Ferry, then south to Sandpoint and west toward Newport and Spokane, before its line reached Seattle in 1893. With two transcontinental railroads in town, Sandpoint bloomed. In 1898, L. D. Farmin and his wife platted a new townsite across Sand Creek, and families and businesses bought lots and moved across to ground with more room to grow, building the downtown visitors stroll today.
Did you know you can still touch that era on an ordinary evening in Sandpoint? The brick Northern Pacific depot built in 1916, in the town's greatest boom period, still serves Amtrak's Empire Builder, and trains still cross the lake on the 1904 bridge. Listen for a whistle drifting up from town while you are on the mountain at Schweitzer, and you are hearing the sound that made this place, first carried across the water by a little steamer in 1866, then by rail in 1882, and still rolling through today.