Terry N. Toedtemeier

Focusing on the Columbia Gorge

Photography, Geology, and the Pioneer West

Lewis and Clark were such Careful Observers of the land-scape that they set a "methodological precedent" for future surveys and explorations of the American West, as Jim E. O'Conner explains in this issue. The rigorous observations in their journal entries were, in essence, proto-photographic, presaging the role photography would play in documenting the West during the U.S. Geologic Surveys over a half century later. Since the 1860s, photographers have continually taken images of the landscapes from just above Celilo Falls west to Crown Point, and scores of images exist that qualify as de facto illustrations for Lewis and Clark's journals during their travels through the gorge. Many of them document features that Lewis and Clark would have seen but that are submerged today, and many depict significant geologic features.

In the American West, geology and photography have been intimately linked ever since substantial placer gold deposits were discovered in Coloma, California, in January 1848. Although the medium of photography was only a decade old in 1849, the California Gold Rush was the first major event in American history to be recorded in photographs. The geologists who established the California Geological Survey in 1860 were eager to obtain photographs to support their field studies and findings; and in 1867, Congress approved a series of geologic explorations of the West that included funds for photographic documentation. Not coincidentally, on July 12 of that same year the now-legendary Carleton Watkins arrived in Portland, Oregon, to photograph along the Willamette River from Oregon City to Portland and along the Columbia from Vancouver, Washington, to Celilo east of The Dalles. Much like Lewis and Clark, Watkins's vision was informed by a deep appreciation and awareness of geologic form.

Prior to his arrival in Oregon, Watkins had established close ties with contacts at the California Geological Survey. On numerous occasions, he produced photographs of the Yosemite Valley at the request of survey director Josiah Dwight Whitney and his assistant, William Henry Brewer. These geologists, historian Peter Palmquist has noted, "were soon to become Watkins' greatest champions."¹ Whitney's interest in the geology of the Northwest was a driving force in the California Geological Society's support of Watkins's 1867 travels along the Columbia River. Although Whitney did not accompany Watkins on the journey, he had every confidence in the photographer's ability to recognize significant geologic subjects and create the best possible images of their features. From Rooster Rock east to Celilo Falls, Watkins produced thirty-six mammoth plate negatives in approximately three months. Measuring eighteen by twenty-two inches, the collodion wet-plate glass negatives he made required a correspondingly large camera. Further, the negatives had to be prepared and, following their lengthy exposure, processed in the field. After his return to San Francisco in late November 1867, there were so few sunlit days suitable for contact printing the negatives that it took until mid-April the following year to produce a full set of prints for exhibition.

Tumwater, Columbia River, O.R. & N., c. 1878
Albert H. Wulzen (American, b. Germany, 1844–1917)
albumen print

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs courtesy of Terry Toedtemeier

Over the past several decades, Watkins's 1867 photographs of the Columbia River Gorge have gone from near-total obscurity to being hailed as icons of the history of photography. In 2002, the U.S. Postal Service chose to reproduce one of Watkins's gorge images in a series of twenty Masters of American Photography commemorative stamps. Had the stamps been horizontally rather than vertically formatted, my vote would have been for one of the most remarkable geologic landscape photographs ever made: Passage of The Dalles. Although we know this photograph was made in 1867, the image allows our imagination to transcend time and space. Had the technology been available, it could have been made in the time of Lewis and Clark. In choice of camera placement and framing, Watkins depicted with a kind of glacial purity only rock, water, and sky — the elemental states of solid, liquid, and vapor. Like a NASA photograph of the Martian surface, the image is so barrenly planetary as to suggest an origin long lost in the abyssal depths of geologic time.

In terms of the geologic clock, the flat basalt surfaces that Watkins photographed at The Dalles were stripped bare by cataclysmic floods only recently, during the waning centuries of the ice age. Related erosional features, now under the backwaters of three closely spaced dams, dominated The Dalles Basin and areas upriver for more than twenty miles. One of the classic pieces of geologic literature about the formation of these and hundreds of other features on the Columbia Plateau is The Grand Coulee, by the legendary geologist J Harlan Bretz, published in 1932. Although Bretz's report focuses on a site far upriver from The Dalles, its implications give a rather emphatic picture of the magnitude of the floods. Reflecting on the forces required to create a the gigantic dryfalls at Grand Coulee, he wrote: "We have Niagara and the Victoria Falls in action to guide us and can grant the possibility of a former falls of their magnitude. But can we think favorably of a vanished cataract more than seven times the width of Niagara and more than five times its height?"² Once the evidence is understood, signs of catastrophic flooding can be found in countless places along the Columbia and its tributary drainages.

Photographs are rarely sufficient to prove or disprove geologic theories, although they have been bent to this service often enough. They are, however, capable of enhancing our appreciation and fondness for the natural world. The best photographs — ones such as Passage of The Dalles— can pique our curiosity, kindle the fires of our imagination, and touch our emotions in ways we often do not even recognize or understand. With such images, we can, for a moment, step out of the visible present into an envisioned past or an imagined future. These photographs are but a vignette of a time and place, yet with them we can come closer to a vision of the Columbia River as Lewis and Clark saw it. Photography has been a part of the western experience just long enough for us to see, just once, a tick of the second hand on the geologic clock.

Passage of The Dalles, Columbia River, 1867
Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829–1916)
albumen print

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs courtesy of Terry Toedtemeier

The basalt surfaces in the area of The Dalles were over-swept by dozens of cataclysmic floods during the final centuries of the ice age that ended roughly 11,500 years ago. The amount of basalt that was scoured, wrenched, and stripped away by the floods is not known. Prior to construction of The Dalles Dam, the river dropped approximately eighty feet from the water level above Celio Falls to the level below The Dalles rapids. Undoubtedly there were other cataracts along this eight-mile stretch over ledges of rock that were carved away by the force of the water. The degree of pothole erosion that occurred in the riverbed offers some idea of the magnitude of these forces. In preparation for construction of The Dalles Dam, caissons — chambers to allow construction — were built to divert the water. Numerous deep potholes were exposed. Lowering plumb lines to the bottom of the deepest, construction engineers set the depth at two hundred feet below sea level.

Crown Point and Rooster Rock, ca. 1916
Albert Henry Barnes (American, 1876–1920)
Maryhill Museum gelatin glass plate negative #1938.01.226

Courtesy Maryhill Museum of Art

The Columbia River and Columbia Hills, ca. 1913
Albert Henry Barnes (American, 1876–1920)
Maryhill Museum gelatin glass plate negative #1938.01.356

Courtesy Maryhill Museum of Art

From the area east of Celilo Falls to west of the mouth of the Sandy River, Lewis and Clark encountered substantial sand deposits. In their passage across a landscape predominated by massive basalt formations over fifteen million years in age, the explorers encountered myriad geologic features. Celilo Falls was itself a remnant of cataclysmic flooding at the end of the ice age. Farther downriver at the Rapids of the Cascades, they unwittingly crossed one of the largest landslide masses in the region. They had already witnessed a drowned forest some distance upriver from these rapids. Accurately interpreting the implications of these and numerous other geologic clues throughout the gorge would take geologists well into the twentieth century.

Albert Barnes made the photograph Crown Point and Rooster Rock looking northwest from a promontory just east of Crown Point, shortly after the Columbia River Highway was completed. Untold millions of photographs have been made of the river from Crown Point, but Barnes's is one of only a handful that look back upriver. Far below, Rooster Rock is seen at the terminus of an isthmus, elegantly flanked by shallow embayments and sandbars. As photographed by Barnes, this section of the river looks very much as Lewis and Clark would have seen it.

Looking northeast from the south rim of the canyon at a point approximately one mile west of Rufus, Oregon, Barnes's photograph of the Columbia River and Columbia hills is one of the few views showing the extent of the sand dunes along this section of the river. Re-photographed today, the John Day Dam would appear on the far right edge of the photograph and the dunes would be hidden by backwaters from The Dalles Dam, about twenty miles downriver.

Head of Bradford's Island, Columbia River, ca. 1878
Albert H. Wulzen (American, b. Germany, 1844–1917)
albumen print

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs courtesy of Terry Toedtemeier

Wind Mountain from Wyeth, ca. 1878
Albert H. Wulzen (American, b. Germany, 1844–1917)
albumen print

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs courtesy of Terry Toedtemeier

Columbia River from above The Dalles, c. 1878
Albert H. Wulzen (American, b. Germany, 1844–1917)
albumen print

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs courtesy of Terry Toedtemeier

Invariably, Albert Wulzen was drawn to discrete geologic features and sites representative of the varied topography of the gorge. Head of Bradford's Island, for example, demonstrates the rugged nature of the river just below the upper Cascade Rapids. Rock masses up to fifteen feet wide are still falling off the mountainous headwall cliffs above the Bonneville landslide. Even after five and a half centuries of erosion and the inundation of backwaters from Bonneville Dam, the turbulent surface of the currents are still visible at the head of Bradford's Island.

Wind Mountain from Wyeth depicts both a noted landmark and a portion of the geologically significant drowned forest. Juxtaposing the remnant stumps of the drowned forest with the distant view the mountain, Wulzen underscores the dynamic nature of gorge geology.

Lewis and Clark recorded seeing the tree stumps depicted in the foreground of Wind Mountain from Wyeth as well as other such stumps to depths of thirty feet under water. They accurately surmised that once-forested land had been drowned by a sudden rise of the river. Just six miles downstream lie the Cascade Rapids, an expression of what geologists have named the Bonneville landslide. This slide, like other geologic events in the history of the gorge, was of an order of magnitude beyond anything Lewis and Clark would have expected to find. One could traverse, as they did, a small piece of the slide's rough surface and have no idea that everything around them and beneath their feet had been part of a mountain some three miles away.

Prior to his employment as an outdoor photographer for the Davidson Studio in Portland, Oregon, Wulzen served as an assistant to Carleton Watkins. Though the artistic strength of his work did not rival that of his predecessor and former employer, it was likely never intended to. Wulzen was a prolific and gifted image maker who photographed both the obvious and less obvious aspects of the land.

Columbia River near Viento, ca. 1890
Arthur B. McAlpin (American, 1856–1947) and Charles Y. Lamb (American, 1855–1945)
albumen print

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs courtesy of Terry Toedtemeier

The extremes of low-lying bottomland and high-angle talus slopes characterized the topography of the gorge. McAlpin and Lamb's photograph of Columbia River near Viento is one of the few illustrating the extent of the bottomland along this section of the Columbia. This landscape necessarily changed as the river level rose after Bonneville Dam was constructed.

Depending on the year, the title for Frank Abell's photograph could read Castle Dome, Cathedral Rock, or Saint Peters Dome. This high-sided rock formation lies just west of Yeon Mountain, which at one time was itself called Saint Peters Dome. Regardless of the geographic names, this photograph illustrates a common occurrence in the gorge: talus slopes near the maximum angle of repose — the steepest angle a slope of loose rock will sustain. The talus aprons around Shellrock and Wind mountains to the east have attained the maximum angle of repose. Coping with the consequences of highways built at the bottom of such slopes is a problem: removing rock renders the slope unstable and will trigger a slide. Walking across a maximum-angle talus slope demonstrates poor judgment, as very large areas of rock, both above and below, are likely to begin moving.

Castle Dome, ca. 1880s
Frank G. Abell (American, 1844–1910)
albumen print

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs courtesy of Terry Toedtemeier

Glimpse of the Columbia, ca. 1916
George M. Weister (American, 1862–1922)
gelatin silver print

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs courtesy of Terry Toedtemeier

The opening of the Columbia River Highway, dedicated on June 7, 1916, marked the dawn of automobile tourism in the Columbia Gorge. George Weister was one of several photographers eager to build an inventory for the new tourist market. The tourists themselves were also making their own photographs. One can estimate, based on an exponential expansion, that the total number of photographs made in the gorge was, within a few years' time, matched and exceeded by a flood of new ones. A comparable increase in the number of photographs that would be considered good from a curator's perspective failed to materialize.

Weister is to be commended for valuing and attending to the details of place. Glimpse of the Columbia presents a landscape in miniature that frames a vista of great depth. The windowed, natural garden Weister has shown us is deceptively simple. It is, in fact, a vignette of the transitional ecosystem of the eastern gorge. Here Douglas fir, common to the rainforested western gorge, grows among poison oak, pine, and scrub oak, common to the more arid eastern landscape.

Watkins's photograph of Multnomah Falls gives viewers a palpable sense of the moist atmosphere and lush forested slopes of the western gorge. The rounds of cut wood lying along the creek bed hint at traces of human presence in the landscape in this photograph, taken on Watkins's second journey to the Columbia River.

Multnomah Falls, Columbia River Scenery, Oregon, 1882
Carleton E. Watkins
albumen print

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs courtesy of Terry Toedtemeier

A Sea of Sand, among the Brakers [sic], 1899
Benjamin A. Gifford (American, 1859–1936)
gelatin silver print

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs courtesy of Terry Toedtemeier

Whirl-pool, Celilo Falls, 1901
Benjamin A. Gifford (American, 1859–1936)
gelatin silver print

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs courtesy of Terry Toedtemeier

In the eastern gorge, it was wind that gave greatest form to the sand and water that continued the erosion of the river rock. In these two photographs, waves of sand are juxtaposed with heaping masses of water. These landscape features were, in fact, a stone's throw away from each other. Together they provide a cross-sectional view of the dynamic beauty of the gorge less than a century ago.

The Oregon Department of Transportation added an expansive "mineral blanket" to the flanks of Interstate 84 east of The Dalles during construction. A rather extensive project, the undertaking was designed to keep a large area of sand and sand dunes — shown in A Sea of Sand, among the Brakers —from drifting onto the freeway and to prevent frequent sandstorms from blinding motorists. A mineral blanket is a layer of coarse, crushed rock covered by a wire mesh that looks like cyclone fencing. This, in turn, is covered with soil and planted with hardy grasses. Highway engineers and geologists are likely to take sand seriously. John Elliot Allen, whose abundant writings brought the annals of Northwest geology to thousands of readers, was one such geologist. Long ago, in a conversation I had with Dr. Allen, he remarked of the sand at The Dalles: "We don't have a paper on that sand. Somebody ought to do a thesis on it.... We don't even know how long it's been there."

Benjamin Gifford was a master photographer and a superb technician of both camera and darkroom. He alternately had studios in Portland and The Dalles. His documentation of steam-era transportation in the gorge at the turn of the twentieth century was unrivaled. Gifford was also a prolific and gifted photographer of landforms along the river. No one photographed the varied and often peculiar rock formations of the area more or better. Likewise, no one made as many year-round photographs of the seasonal conditions of the Columbia. Taken at high water from a commanding position, Whirl-pool, Celilo Falls, conveys both the physical complexity and full ferocity of the falls at Celilo.

Indians Fishing at the Long Narrows, ca. 1890
Bertram C. Towne (active Portland, Oregon, late 1880s–1890s)
albumen print

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs courtesy of Terry Toedtemeier

The Columbia above The Dalles, ca. 1950s
Alfred Monner (American, 1909–1998)
gelatin silver print

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs courtesy of Terry Toedtemeier

Traveling along a relatively short section of the river, Lewis and Clark would have passed from a rocky, primal landscape dominated by cataracts and some of the most unnavigable portions of the Columbia to the expansiveness and breadth of the upper river.

At the Long Narrows, riverboat pilots felt it was as though the broad Columbia River they were used to navigating had been turned on edge and jammed into a narrow passage passage through solid rock. Bertram Towne's photograph, Indians Fishing at the Long Narrows, provides a good view of the treacherous nature of the eight-mile stretch of the Columbia between Celilo Falls and The Dalles Rapids.

In the years before construction of The Dalles Dam had been completed, Alfred Monner made a number of photographs of Indians fishing at Celilo Falls, of the annual salmon festival that was held there, and of many of the rock art panels that were soon to disappear when the dam became operational on March 10, 1957. Monner had a fondness for the spacious beauty of the Columbia Gorge east of The Dalles. Feeling a spiritual connectedness to this open landscape, it was here that he made many of his finest landscape photographs. Taken on a particularly still day, The Columbia above The Dalles conveys the sense of tranquility and awe Monner felt for the land and the river.

Notes

Copies of these images are available at the Oregon Historical Society: Watkins, p. 425, OrHi 21583; Towne, p. 436, OrHi 4064; Gifford, p. 434, OrHi 103549.

^1.� Peter E. Palmquist, Carleton E. Watkins, Photographer of the American West (Albuquerque: Published for the Amon Carter Museum by the University of New Mexico Press, 1983), 12.

^2.� J Harlan Bretz, The Grand Coulee, Special Publication no. 15, ed. G.M. Wrigley (New York: American Geographical Society, 1932), 2.

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