Spokane Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
57 free Spokane trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Spokane invented Father's Day, hosted the first environmental World's Fair, calls itself Hooptown USA and was the smallest city ever to stage a world exposition. This Spokane trivia quiz covers the second-largest city in Washington from the fur-trading post of 1810 to today: the tribe whose name means children of the sun, the incorporation as Spokane Falls, the Great Fire of 1889 and the Romanesque downtown Kirtland Cutter built afterwards, the railroads, the mining rushes and Expo '74. There are questions on Gonzaga and the Zags, Whitworth, the Bloomsday Run, Hoopfest, Pig Out in the Park, the Chiefs and their Memorial Cups, the Indians and the Velocity, Riverfront Park's carousel, Manito Park, the Davenport Hotel, why the airport code is GEG, why the city gets less than half of Seattle's rain, and the locals who made good: Bing Crosby, John Stockton, Ryne Sandberg, Tom Foley, Craig T. Nelson and Ryan Lewis. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the city and its people, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 57 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Spokane is the second-most populous city in which US state?
Washington
Washington's second-largest city incorporated in 1881, the year the Northern Pacific Railroad arrived; the trains set off a boom that carried it past 100,000 people by 1910.
Q 02Spokane is known as the birthplace of which national holiday?
Father's Day
Father's Day began in Spokane on 19 June 1910, organised by a local woman who had heard a Mother's Day sermon at the Central Methodist Episcopal Church; it became a permanent national holiday in 1972.
Q 03Which Spokane woman persuaded the city's ministers to hold the first celebration of a now-national holiday in June 1910?
Sonora Smart Dodd
Sonora Smart Dodd got the idea while listening to a Mother's Day sermon in 1909, and lived to see her holiday made permanent in 1972, when she was 90.
Q 04What is Spokane's long-standing unofficial nickname, taken from a flowering shrub?
Lilac City
Lilac City stuck because the shrub, introduced in the early 1900s, flourished in the local climate, and garden clubs then built a spring Lilac Festival around the blooms.
Q 05Which steel animal sculpture, made for Expo '74, vacuums up litter that visitors feed it in downtown Spokane?
A goat
A goat: Sister Paula Turnbull, Spokane's 'welding nun', built the Garbage Goat with a vacuum in its mouth, and dairy goat farmers protested that it made goats look like trash eaters.
Q 06The name of the Spokane tribe is most often translated from Salish as what?
Children of the sun
Children of the sun is the reading the city itself uses, though the origin is disputed: 'muddy people' is another proposal, and some scholars call all of them folk etymologies.
Q 07Spokane House, the trading post founded in 1810 where two rivers meet, was built by which fur-trading company?
The North West Company
The North West Company built Spokane House; the Hudson's Bay Company inherited it in the 1821 merger and closed it a few years later, partly because the beaver were trapped out and supplies had to come overland by packhorse.
Q 08Which fur-trade explorer and mapmaker sent the men who built Spokane House, the 1810 trading post on the Spokane River?
David Thompson
David Thompson sent Jaco Finlay and Finan McDonald to build the post in 1810, and they picked a fork in the river where local tribes already gathered each year to catch and dry salmon.
Q 09Under what name was Spokane officially incorporated as a city in 1881?
Spokane Falls
Spokane Falls was the city's name for its first decade; voters dropped 'Falls' in 1891, at the same election that approved a new charter for a town grown to about 20,000.
Q 10After the Great Fire of 1889 levelled downtown Spokane, where did shops, saloons and offices quickly reopen?
In tents
In tents: a canvas 'tent city' housed shops, saloons, insurance adjusters and even a newspaper within days of the fire, which had burned more than 30 blocks, while owners rebuilt in brick and stone.
Q 11Why could firefighters do little to stop Spokane's Great Fire of 1889 when it broke out?
Weak water pressure
Weak water pressure left the hoses useless; the waterworks superintendent, away that evening, took the blame and resigned, though the fault was later traced elsewhere.
Q 12Which architect, trained as an illustrator, designed Spokane's Davenport Hotel and many downtown buildings after the 1889 fire?
Kirtland Cutter
Kirtland Cutter came to Spokane in 1886 and worked as a teller in his uncle's bank while starting out as an architect, so he was on the spot when the Great Fire left a whole downtown to rebuild.
Q 13Spokane's Davenport Hotel opened in 1914 with novel technology for its day, including which feature?
Q 21Which Hall of Fame point guard was born and raised in Spokane and stayed home to play college basketball for Gonzaga?
John Stockton
John Stockton was only the 16th pick of the 1984 NBA draft, yet he retired 19 seasons later with a league-record 15,806 assists.
Q 22Which Chicago Cubs great was born in Spokane and was a three-sport star at the city's North Central High School?
Ryne Sandberg
Ryne Sandberg, named for Yankees pitcher Ryne Duren, was a high school All-America quarterback who had signed to play college football before the Phillies drafted him and he chose baseball instead.
Q 23Which Spokane-born congressman served as Speaker of the US House from 1989 to 1995?
Tom Foley
Air cooling and chilled water
Air cooling and chilled water were 1914 novelties at Louis Davenport's hotel, which closed in 1985 and stood under threat of demolition until a local developer restored it and reopened it in 2002.
Q 14Which US president came to Spokane in May 1974 to open its world's fair, Expo '74?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon declared the fair open before a crowd of 85,000 while the Watergate scandal closed in on him; three months later he resigned.
Q 15Which theme did Spokane choose for Expo '74, its 1974 world's fair?
The environment
The environment was the theme, and the fair practised it on its own site: Spokane tore out the rail lines and trestles that had covered its downtown riverbanks to make room for the pavilions.
Q 16After Expo '74 closed, its fairgrounds became which 100-acre park in downtown Spokane?
Riverfront Park
Riverfront Park kept one relic of the rail depots razed for the fair: the Great Northern clocktower, which had carried a sign counting down the days to opening.
Q 17Gonzaga University was founded in 1887 by which religious order?
The Jesuits
The Jesuits opened Gonzaga under Father Joseph Cataldo, a missionary who wanted a Catholic college partly because he feared the region's new Protestant schools would draw away his Native students.
Q 18Whitworth University, founded in 1890 and moved to Spokane in 1914, is affiliated with which church?
Presbyterian
Presbyterian minister George Whitworth started the school near Puget Sound; it moved east in 1914 after developer Jay P. Graves donated a campus, reckoning a college would lift the value of the lots he was selling nearby.
Q 19Gonzaga reached its first Final Four in 2017, then lost the national title game to which team?
North Carolina
North Carolina won 71-65 in Gonzaga's first title game; the Zags came back unbeaten in 2021 and lost the final again, that time to Baylor.
Q 20Who was promoted from assistant to Gonzaga Bulldogs head coach in 1999?
Mark Few
Mark Few had spent a decade on the Gonzaga staff when Dan Monson left for Minnesota months after the 1999 Elite Eight run; Few took over and had the Zags back in the NCAA tournament in his first season.
Tom Foley held his Spokane seat for 30 years, then lost it in 1994 after joining a lawsuit against term limits his state's voters had approved; no sitting Speaker had been voted out since 1862.
Q 24Which legendary crooner was raised in Spokane and has a downtown theater named in his honour?
Bing Crosby
Bing Crosby came to Spokane as a small boy in 1906 and sang at the downtown Clemmer Theatre as a young unknown; in 2006 the same house was renamed the Bing Crosby Theater.
Q 25Which member of the voice cast of Pixar's The Incredibles was born in Spokane?
Craig T. Nelson
Craig T. Nelson, the voice of Mr. Incredible, began in stand-up comedy alongside future director Barry Levinson and struggled through the 1970s before the sitcom Coach made him a star.
Q 26Which artist on the Grammy-winning 2012 album The Heist was born in Spokane?
Ryan Lewis
Ryan Lewis met Macklemore through Myspace in 2006 and produced The Heist; the pair released it themselves, with no record label behind them, and still won four Grammys in 2014.
Q 27Spokane International Airport's code GEG is a legacy of which former name?
Geiger Field
Geiger Field got its name in 1941, when the War Department bought the county's Sunset Field and renamed it for Major Harold Geiger, an Army aviation pioneer killed in a 1927 crash.
Q 28Which US Air Force unit, the area's largest employer, is based at Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane?
The 92d Air Refueling Wing
The 92d Air Refueling Wing flies KC-135 Stratotankers from Fairchild Air Force Base; the base opened in 1942 as an Army air depot, took General Muir Fairchild's name in 1951 and has been Spokane County's largest employer.
Q 29Which mountain range's rain shadow leaves Spokane with less than half of Seattle's yearly precipitation?
The Cascades
The Cascades catch storms blowing in from the Pacific and wring most of the moisture out on their western slopes, leaving the land to their east, Spokane included, in a dry rain shadow.
Q 30Which tree is the official tree of the City of Spokane?
Ponderosa pine
Ponderosa pine grows all over Spokane, and science first met it here: botanist David Douglas collected the earliest recorded specimens near the present-day city in 1826.