The town sprawls along the track of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad. For a number of years Kamiakin, the Yakima chief who in the fifties took a leading part in the resistance to the white settlers, lived here. In 1861, urged by his homesick wife, he returned to Washington from voluntary exile among the Crow Native Americans. Eventually, Kamiakin was crowded off his farm, and about 1880 he died in his camp near the Palouse River.