Ice Age Floods Formed These Undulating Green Hills of Washington’s Wheat Powerhouse

Palouse Hills, Washington

The Palouse rolls across eastern Washington like waves frozen in dirt and grass. Miles of green and gold hills flow into Idaho, making farmers rich and photographers happy. Local wheat feeds millions while the views draw visitors from around the world. Here’s what makes this Washington farm country so special.

Ice Age Birth Story

This whole thing started 1.6 million years ago in the Ice Age. Until about 10,000 years back, massive glaciers from Canada sat on this land, grinding rock into fine powder – that “loess” stuff that made the rich soil.

These ice monsters pushed as far south as Spokane, scraping bedrock into dust as fine as flour. Then the dust washed into huge lakes from the famous Missoula Floods before winds picked it up again and dumped it here.

Name Roots

The name comes from the Palus tribe (sometimes written as Palloatpallah or Pelusha). French-Canadian fur trappers, being French, changed it to “pelouse,” which means “land with short grass” or “lawn.” Over time, it morphed into “Palouse.”

Rock Layer Timeline

Each layer of this loess tells a story: the bottom layers piled up between 2 and 1 million years ago, while the top layer formed between 15,000 years ago and today.

Between each layer are these hard calcium-rich sheets called calcrete, which only form when the dust stops blowing for thousands of years.

Lewis and Clark’s Flowery Mistake

In 1806, Meriwether Lewis saw fields of camas plants and thought they were lakes. These blue-purple flowers grew so thick in wet spots that from a distance, they looked like water.

First Settler’s Claim

William Ewing was the firsts to plant his flag on the north fork of the Palouse River in 1869. Others like Joseph Hammer and A. Towner followed with their families, building the first non-native homes. Ewing put up a rough log cabin near what’s now the town of Palouse.

Birth of a Town

The town of Palouse got going in 1874 when William P. “Pap” Breeding built a flour mill. A year later, he paid someone to map out streets, creating the bones of the town. Breeding’s mill used water from the Palouse River to grind wheat that farmers hauled in by wagon.

Getting wheat to this mill and others that followed meant cutting the first real roads through these hills.

The town grew with a blacksmith, a bank, and a hotel that’s still there today as Roy’s cafe – the kind of place where the coffee’s been on the burner since 1880 and tastes like it.

Wheat Boom Years

The 1880s hit the Palouse like a gold rush, but for wheat. This was part of a bigger wheat fever spreading across southeast Washington that had started down in Walla Walla.

Too Many Horses Needed

They had combines early on, but most Palouse farmers couldn’t use them – you needed 40 horses and six men just to work flat ground. This made the Palouse the slow kid in class when it came to using new farm tools.

The hills made it worse – teams had to drag massive machines up slopes as steep as 50%, and horses dropped dead from the strain. The first gas-powered combines they tried in 1914 had 40 horsepower but weighed a crushing 18 tons.

Hanson’s Hill Fix

Everything changed when Raymond Hanson invented self-leveling combines in 1941. His rig let the cutting part follow the hill while the cab and engine stayed flat, so farmers could work steep slopes without dying.

Before Hanson, men regularly got crushed when their rigs tipped over. The genius part? He came up with this when he was just 19, working his dad’s farm with horses. His first test model was built from tin cans and scrap wood, later upgraded with parts from junked Model Ts.