| Book Review | Oregon Historical Quarterly, 108.2

Reviews

RIVER OF RENEWAL: MYTH & HISTORY IN THE KLAMATH BASIN

by Stephen Most

Oregon Historical Society Press in association with University of Washington Press, Portland, Oregon, 2006. Photographs, maps, notes, index. 292 pages. $22.50 paper.

Although certainly not geographic twins, the Klamath and Columbia rivers are two of a kind. They share the distinction of being the Pacific Northwest's only two rivers to reach the ocean by cutting through the formidable barrier of the Cascade Range. Among a number of other similarities, since the beginning of the twentieth century, the Klamath and Columbia have felt the heavy hand of human manipulation, particularly for irrigation supplies and hydroelectric power generation. As a result, their uppermost reaches became blocked off from the annual spawning runs of salmon.

Differences between the two rivers are, of course, equally profound. Much of the Columbia, for example, has been transformed into a continuous series of reservoirs, a chain of slack-water sections that carry heavy barge traffic all the way from Portland to Idaho. In contrast, the Klamath still retains much of its wild, whitewater character. Their differences extend also to the attentions of historians. Library bookshelves bend under the weight of volumes written about the Columbia River. By comparison, the Klamath has inspired a relative pittance of human or environmental histories.

Stephen Most presents us with a worthy, well-written addition to libraries' Klamath River sections with River of Renewal: Myth & History in the Klamath Basin. The author focuses on the nexus of the Klamath Basin's historical bounty — astounding fish runs, seemingly limitless water supply, great forests — and its human inhabitants' relentlessly growing demands on those same resources. Most spends nearly two-thirds of his pages narrating events on the lower river; within the other third, his discussion of the upper basin concentrates (appropriately, for his purposes) on the federal government's development of reclamation projects around Lower Klamath and Tule lakes (both of which, due to these irrigation projects, now barely exist as bodies of water) and the unforeseen legacy of this heavily subsidized effort.

River of Renewal provides an overview of Native cultures prior to the contact period as well as tribal restoration/rejuvenation efforts since 1970, but it dispenses with the Klamath Basin's Euroamerican history — aside from that history's devastating impact on Native people from the 1850s through the 1960s and its intensive natural-resource-extraction developments since 1900 — in comparatively short order. Most, a playwright and film documentarian, concentrates on recent resource controversies, employing chapter titles and terms such as "Salmon War, "Water War," and "Timber War," phrases familiar from regional media coverage of the past thirty years. Other than some first-person interviews with participants in these conflicts, the book relies almost entirely on secondary and tertiary historical sources. In large part, Most employs those sources fairly and effectively, giving readers a balanced review of the basin's overarching historical themes. The book's photographs and maps add needed context and orientation. (Only one minor error of fact popped out at me: The 2002 Biscuit Fire did not burn any lands within the Klamath River basin; it did include some acreage in California's Smith River watershed.)

In terms of its other stated theme, that of myth, River of Renewal engages with and quite intelligently employs some of the basin's distinctive traditions. These include the once elaborate and now reinvigorated World Renewal ceremonies of the lower river's Yurok, Hupa, and Karuk peoples, as well as the area's State of Jefferson political movement during the 1940s. That movement was simply the most newsworthy in a string of such attempts to force Sacramento and Salem powerbrokers' attention on the area's economic needs by "seceding" from California and Oregon to form a single new state.

Inevitably, the author also invokes the Klamath Basin's most popular myth-as-legend, Bigfoot. Thankfully, Most does his readers the favor of pointing out that the famous Bluff Creek footprints and subsequent film footage of Sasquatch were hoaxes.

Most himself notes that "one difference between myth and history is that historians attempt to understand why events occur, while explanations can ruin a good story" (p. 119). Alas, although the popular story of Bigfoot has now been all but debunked, River of Renewal essentially amplifies (and imparts a gloss of respectable veracity to) another local legend, one that, as interesting and dramatic as it may be, does not merit serious consideration as a historical event. This is the story of the alleged poisoning (by means of strychnine-laced beef during a "treaty-signing" celebratory feast) of "hundreds, or thousands" of Shasta Indians in the 1850s by their duplicitous white hosts (pp. 27 and 200–201). This supposed event (which is completely unmentioned in any of the plentiful written records of that time, records that do not shy away from detailing and condemning actual atrocities by settlers against Native people) is more than historically improbable for a multitude of reasons, which cannot begin to be detailed in this short space. Suffice it to say that reputable scholars, including a distinguished historian of the region's Indian-white conflict, have looked into the story and concluded it to be nothing more than that. A few years ago, one local military historian published a detailed rebuttal of the account, not out of some knee-jerk defense of the pioneers but due to the sheer implausibility of the story.

The legend of the Fort Jones poisoning seems in large measure to have been the mid- to late-twentieth-century product of one local family (of part-Shasta descent), people who possibly built the story around a kernel found in the historical record's actual mention of an entirely separate and far less disastrous alleged poisoning of the same period — that is, Indian fighter Ben Wright's encounter with the Modocs near Lost River, nearly a hundred miles to the east. As a family legend, in recent years the Fort Jones story has been told, re-told, and told again as gospel until it has begun to appear in some minor local histories and in the local press. It may make for a compelling tale, but the author has done neither his readers nor the region's history a service by repeating it without also providing adequate critical commentary. Now, like Bigfoot, the legend of the Fort Jones poisoning doubtless will continue to stalk the land for years to come.

Aside from this one misstep, Stephen Most deserves praise for his effort. Clearly not a work of rigorously objective history, River of Renewal offers an impressionistic, highly informative trip through the Klamath Basin's contentious past, and it does that particular job quite well.

Jeff LaLande

Southern Oregon University

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