Passages selected metformin hcl 1000 mg and edited by Carl Ruud 

Early in 1884, as the first stage to link Spokane to Douglas County reached Okanogan, a small, five-building town to the east of present day Douglas, the first passenger off that carrier was 47-year-old Dr. John B. Smith. His son, John H.D. Smith writes in “Orondo, As I Knew It,” that his father was born to Scottish parents in London, Ontario, on October of 1837. After moving to Minnesota to farm he enlisted in 1862 in the 10th Minnesota Regiment. After fighting in the Sioux War and the American Civil War, he was discharged in 1865 at age 28. Then, he studied and practiced medicine in the east before he decided to move “out west.”

On July 2, 1884, J.B. Smith walked downhill from the Badger Post Office to the banks of the Columbia River to claim a “soldier homestead” near the Entiat Rapids. Using his three year “veterans” credit, Smith was able to show “proof” of his 160 acre homestead claim to the Yakima land office after just two years on his land. J.B. Smith began issuing the Orondo News on July 11, 1889, some time before a newspaper was published in Wenatchee. He printed his first papers on “patent sheet”, one page at a time, using an old U.S. Army printing press. By November of 1890, Dr. Smith had moved his paper to Waterville and renamed it the Douglas County Democrat. As well as platting and promoting his riverside land, which he had named Orondo, he served as the Douglas County Coroner and at least two terms as a Washington State legislator, representing Douglas County as a member of the People Party.

John H.D. Smith recorded that his father named Orondo, after a character mentioned in Greek mythology as it applies to the sunken continent of Atlantis. Between 1884 and 1888, the community received its mail thru the Badger Post Office, some four mountain miles away, where Platt Corbaley was postmaster. When a new road was surveyed in 1886 connecting Wenatchee Ferry Landing and Orondo to Bray’s landing, and Brown Canyon, the link between those sites as well as their connection to the Waterville settlers was improved. The preferred Orondo to Waterville traffic route was Brown’s Canyon until the Corbaly Canyon wagon route was opened in 1886. J.B. Smith then became Orondo’s first postmaster on July 18 1888, and rallied support for the Corbaley Canyon road so as to improve Orondo’s connection to the farmers and timber resources on Badger Mountain. Access to Orondo from Waterville remained through Brown and Corbaley Canyons until convict labor was utilized during 1916 to open the first new Pine Canyon route.

The Orondo village changed its name to Riverview in 1901 but as it seemed to confuse postal officials and others as to its relationship to other communities with that name, the town was renamed Orondo in 1906. As no less than three rail road firms had surveyed proposed routes through Orondo, Smith was anticipating more freight and steamboat service for his growing town. Wheat, freight and fruit packing companies and a new window and door plant were active within the promising business community. But, shortly thereafter, Orondo’s destiny changed quickly when The Great Northern Railroad Company completed its line to Douglas and Mansfield in 1909-1910. Within a short time the same company ignored Orondo and built a new rail line along the opposite side of the river using Steven Pass, rather than the Entiat Valley, for its coastal access route. As the irrigation practices and orchards matured in Orondo, the course of events following those early 1900 transport decisions brought a civil slow down, then a halt to Dr. Smith’s vision to make Orondo the principal business community of the Big Bend country.

Dr. Smith, at age 58, married 26 year old Valerie Haynes of Alstown, in 1895. Valarie and her sister, May, while working their adjacent homesteads, lived in a house which straddled their common border so that both women met the requirement that they were “living on their land claim.” The Smith’s lived in Waterville until 1898 as Dr. Smith was then the editor of the Waterville Index, a role he served for three years. The couple moved back to Orondo in 1901 where Valerie taught school for several years. Smith then donated the land for the Orondo Grange Hall and the Orondo Cemetery,

Certainly a busy and successful builder, laborer, land buyer-seller, postmaster, editor, legislator and general “wheeler and dealer,” Dr. John B. Smith never practiced medicine during his 30 plus years in the Waterville-Orondo area. His son, John H.D. Smith, wrote that his father found the medical profession too full of “humbuggery.”

Dr. J.B. Smith passed away at age 79 in 1917. His wife, Valerie, died in 1907 at age 38. Both are interred in the Orondo Cemetery.