Katrine Barber and Andrew H. Fisher

From Coyote to the Corps of Engineers

Recalling the History of The Dalles–Celilo Reach

AN EAGLE FEATHER IN HIS outstretched hand, Chief Olsen Meanus, Jr., waited for the canoes to land as their oarsmen and women coursed through the quiet waters of Lake Celilo on the Columbia River. The water barely rippled under a light breeze that belied the usual gorge winds, water and winds that originally brought people here thousands of years ago to harvest and dry fish. The March morning was cooled by an overcast sky as thousands gathered along the river to remember Celilo Falls fifty years after its inundation. Meanus was dressed ceremonially, as befitted the occasion, and was joined by other Indian men and women in traditional regalia, as well as by guests dressed more casually in jeans, t-shirts, and fleece. The small flotilla of hand-carved vessels carried visiting Wanapums from upriver and Chinooks from downriver as well as Puyallups and Squaxins from distant Puget Sound. Their landing, with permission by Chief Meanus on behalf of the sixty or so residents of Celilo Village, honored the importance of the mid-Columbia River to Native people for millennia. On shore, the canoes' occupants mingled with visitors who had traveled from throughout the Pacific Northwest to witness their arrival. In the afternoon, people gathered in the village longhouse to hear speeches from Native and non-Native dignitaries and to share a meal of salmon and other traditional foods. On the walls around them hung pictures of the falls that once roared louder than the passing traffic on today's nearby interstate highway.

Chief Olsen Meanus, Jr. ceremonially welcomes guests to the Celilo Inundation Memorial Weekend. An active commercial and subsistence fisherman, Meanus is the first Wyam chief to have been born after the 1957 inundation of Celilo Falls.

HDV Image by Brad Yazzolino

Many people in the Northwest have seen pictures of Celilo Falls — in postcards and prints for sale in gift shops, in museums and art galleries, in murals in hotels and bars — making it one of the region's most iconic landscapes. Those images document a river as it once was, reminding us of how much the Columbia has changed. On March 10, 1957, with the closure of The Dalles Dam, thousands of people throughout the region celebrated a remade river. The concrete edifice that effaced the falls and rapids upstream culminated decades of work by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, politicians in Oregon and Washington, and local Wasco County boosters. After years of planning, lobbying, and testing, a dam dreamed up on paper became manifest, and human industry tamed the mid-Columbia's wild current. Fifty years ago, the closing of the spillway gates signaled success — in the engineering capabilities of the Corps of Engineers, in a burgeoning postwar economy, and in a growing ability to avert Cold War threats using the nation's natural wealth.

This aerial view illustrates the length of The Dalles Dam, which stretches one and one-half miles across the Columbia River and includes a spillway, a powerhouse, navigational locks, and fish ladders.

OHS neg., CN 015349

But The Dalles Dam also signaled the end of an era. Its rising reservoir drowned the ancient fisheries between Celilo Falls and the foot of Threemile Rapids, displacing some of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in North America and swallowing archaeological sites that scholars had only just begun to explore. Newspaper coverage of the event, though primarily celebratory, took note of the loss. "Islands disappeared," the Oregonian reported on March 11, "and then The Dalles-Celilo canal slipped under the surface, and the famed Celilo falls Indian fishing rocks were buried. By nightfall, only a minor riffle remained where the cataracts had roared for thousands of years."¹ That loss is still felt today by mid-Columbia Indians and many non-Indian residents of the region. Expressions of regret and remorse counter the triumphal story of river development, and the tension between those narratives permeates our understanding of Celilo Falls and the mid-Columbia River.

Constructed nine miles downstream from the place where Chief Meanus stood in March 2007, The Dalles Dam dramatically altered the river's course and speed, furthering its transformation into what historian Richard White has called an "organic machine." The Columbia still flows, but it is no longer the natural stream that salmon and Indians knew for millennia. In a matter of decades, the federal government harnessed the river to produce power and carry goods for the urban, industrial society whose engineers now regulate its passage to the sea. The fiftieth anniversary of The Dalles Dam's completion and the resulting inundation of the ancient riverscape provides an opportunity to reflect on those changes and their ramifications. As with the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial and the sesquicentennial of the 1855 treaties, this anniversary presents an occasion to reconvene, to gather knowledge about the Northwest and its history, to tell stories, and to remember what once was and how it has changed. This special issue of the Oregon Historical Quarterly is devoted to understanding an important place — an ancient hub on the great wheel that literally powers our region — and to examining the many ways in which its history can be read.

"To come to terms with the Columbia," historian Richard White argues,

we need to come to terms with it as a whole ... not only as a reflection of our own social divisions but as the site in which these divisions play out. If the conversation is not about fish and justice, about electricity and ways of life, about production and nature, about beauty as well as efficiency, and about how these things are inseparable in our own tangled lives, then we have not come to terms with our history on this river.²

To come to terms with what happened to Celilo Falls in 1957, we must look upstream into the past, to what the river was and to the histories of the communities it supported. We can also look downstream, acknowledging the changes wrought on the Columbia and imagining the river we might want in the future. And we can widen our vision to recognize the web of beliefs, decisions, and policies that connect the region to the nation and that led us to this particular present. The year 1957 presents a lens through which we can examine our collective, conflicted relationships to the region and to one another and see how they have changed over time.

SPEEDING PAST THE DALLES DAM and Celilo Village on Interstate 84, many people do not recognize, much less reflect on, the absence of the falls. Even younger Indians sometimes fail to appreciate what existed before the dam. As Cascade Chief Johnny Jackson (Klickitat Cascade) recently lamented, "All they see is a big lake."³ Everyone notices the dam, but the historical forces that called it into being and the consequences of its construction are less obvious.

In many ways, the completion of The Dalles Dam signaled the triumph of one social vision over another. First conceived in the early twentieth century, when enthusiasm for public works and public power ran high across the nation, The Dalles Dam was one of ten dams originally planned for the Columbia River and one of eight actually constructed. Governments, businesses, and many local residents foresaw great dividends in what they thought of as river improvement, but the Columbia's fisheries and the people who relied on them suffered with the completion of each project. Despite tribal protests, Bonneville Dam inundated the rapids at The Cascades near Cascade Locks, Oregon, in 1938, and Grand Coulee Dam covered Kettle Falls in northern Washington in 1941, reducing salmon stocks and aggravating user conflicts at the remaining productive locations, including Celilo Falls. The Corps of Engineers promised to build "in-lieu" sites to replace fishing stations immersed by the Bonneville pool; but decades passed before the agency began construction, and it never compensated Indian families for lost homes and salmon-drying sheds. McNary Dam flooded the Umatilla Rapids in 1954, and John Day Dam eliminated the remaining stretch of free-flowing water between McNary and The Dalles in 1971. The Dalles Dam was merely one link in a chain that now binds the river's current and chokes its remaining anadromous fish runs for the sake of inexpensive electricity, flood control, and easy navigation.

The 1930s to 1970s were decades of near-frantic dam-building throughout the nation. Native Americans and others lost cemeteries, homes, agricultural lands, and access to other resources on the Snake, Colorado, Missouri, Allegany, and Little Tennessee rivers, just to name a few. The American public generally supported river development as a sign of progress, a source of economic prosperity, and a stanchion of national security during World War II and the Cold War. Affected tribes and the Bureau of Indian Affairs spoke out against the projects, but they lacked the political clout of the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation. Some Pacific Northwesterners, such as social worker Barbara MacKenzie and conservationist Gertrude Glutsch Jensen — whose oral histories appear in this issue — worried about social and economic disruptions The Dalles Dam might impose on Indian families. Yet, only a few non-Indians asked the sort of hard questions that Sam Hunters put to his Congressman in 1954: "Must these feats of engineering stand as monuments to our injustice and broken word?"⁴ Ironically, most of those who joined the mid-Columbia tribes in opposing The Dalles Dam were commercial and sport fishers, whose interests had traditionally clashed with Indian treaty rights on the Columbia River.

Preservationists such as John Muir raised ethical arguments against the damming of California's Hetch Hetchy Valley, near Yosemite National Park, in the early twentieth century, but the word "environmentalism" had not even been coined when Congress approved The Dalles Dam in 1950. Since then, public acceptance of dam-building has declined, and growing doubts about dams have helped raise national awareness of environmental issues. In 1956, the year before Celilo Falls went under, a coalition of conservation groups led by the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society managed to stop a dam proposed for remote Echo Park on the Colorado River. Many historians identify that victory as the birth of the modern environmental movement, which has since grown into a major force in American politics. Small, aging dams on the Olympic Peninsula and the White Salmon River are currently slated for removal, but stiff political opposition to breaching four major dams on the Lower Snake River system remains. While dam-building has fallen out of favor in the United States, the export of engineering knowledge first honed on this nation's rivers supports river development projects all over the globe. Construction of dams, with its concurrent displacement of river communities and destruction of riverine habitat, continues in China, the Amazon Basin, and elsewhere around the world. In a time of growing debate about energy production and global climate change, we recognize that hydropower comes with costs and benefits that are not equally distributed. Documenting the transformation of a stretch of one American river gives us a way to examine the sacrifices and rewards of the past and to perceive how they continue to resonate in the present.

Chief Meanus welcomed his neighbors' canoes at the site of Celilo Falls in 2007 within a context of pressing questions about the future as well as seemingly distant historical events, the two mixing together like salt and fresh water in the Columbia's fertile estuary. As Chief Meanus waved his eagle feather in greeting last March, he was enacting a ceremony that honored and reinforced tribal sovereignty, which stands at the center of our understanding of the history of Celilo Falls. In 1855, just fifty years after Meriwether Lewis and William Clark first visited their territory, mid-Columbia Indians ceded millions of acres to the United States while reserving their rights to fish, hunt, and gather at all "usual and accustomed places" off their reservations.⁵ Within two decades, however, those rights came under attack, as Euro-Americans commercialized indigenous resources and attempted to block Indians' access to the river. Federal court decisions consistently upheld treaty fishing rights, but state regulation increased as decades of overfishing, habitat destruction, and industrial pollution decimated salmon populations.

Historically, annual runs of Columbia River salmon and steelhead are estimated to have reached between 10 and 16 million fish; today, the number of returning fish averages 2.5 million per year, most of them from hatcheries.⁶ Native fishers took the blame for that decline and bore the burden of conservation efforts until tribal activists triumphed in court during the 1960s and 1970s, winning the treaty tribes a fair share of the harvest and a voice in salmon management decisions.⁷ By that time, federal Indian policy had shifted away from forced assimilation, but the change came too late to save Celilo Falls. During the go-ahead dam-building years of the 1950s, Congress favored a policy known as Termination, which threatened to abrogate treaties and abolish reservations in the name of freeing Indians from government supervision. The flooding of the fishery and the monetary settlements made with affected tribes were seen as positive steps toward bringing Native Americans into the mainstream. In the words of Yakama historian Richard LaCourse, "The policy of termination was incarnated in [Celilo's] destruction."⁸

Lilly Meanus makes huckleberry pies on October 28, 1956, part of the ceremonies to bid farewell to fishing grounds at Celilo. Huckleberries, like salmon, are considered essential to the continuation of traditional Indian culture.

OHS neg., CN 012618

Although the empowering struggles of the 1960s and 1970s redirected federal policy toward tribal self-determination, Northwest Indians still struggle to safeguard their reserved rights and sacred resources in a society that largely thinks of Native Americans in the past tense. Elsie David (Yakama), whose interview demands that we all recognize the vitality of contemporary Indian people, exclaims: "I read a lot in books, you know, that they used to do this or they used to do that or they had this — a lot of wording is in past tense and I just think, geez, do they think Indians just fell off the face of the earth or what? You know, we're still here." The Dalles–Celilo reach was first and foremost a Native space, and its full history cannot be understood apart from the culture that developed there and defined its meaning for thousands of years before the dams. Although many journalists and scholars have written about the place and its people, this special issue of the Quarterly is one of the first publications to bring academic and indigenous voices together in a discussion of the mid-Columbia's past, present, and future.

A WEEK FOLLOWING THE commemorative events at Celilo Village, people again gathered along the river to share memories and scholarly research at a conference organized to mark the inundation of Celilo Falls. Several of the essays included here are adapted from presentations at that meeting. The Center for Columbia River History worked with many partners, including the Oregon Historical Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities, to host the two-day "Celilo Stories" symposium at the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center in The Dalles. Its innovative program aimed to re-create the ancient gatherings at the falls with all their diversity of affiliations, voices, and views. Building on that foundation, this special issue explores the history of The Dalles–Celilo reach. Like the ancient lava flows that piled up to create distinctive basalt formations, the contributions assembled here represent an aggregation of material and view points from varied periods and sources — oral traditions, academic research, interviews, photographs, historical documents, poetry, and maps — to document the vanished riverscape and explain why its history is meaningful.

Each contribution stands on its own and can be read individually, but we hope readers will discover the ways these pieces enter into conversations with one another. Charles Wilkinson, an expert on Indian law and history, provides not just a historical overview of Celilo Falls but also admits that he hopes the falls will one day resurface. William F. Willingham, who was historian for the Corps of Engineers Portland District for fifteen years, addresses The Dalles Dam from the perspective of the agency that manages it. William L. Lang's survey of the historical literature about Celilo mediates these conflicting perspectives, explaining how understandings of place vary across culture and change over time. "Not surprisingly," he writes, "what meaning is attached to that dramatic place depends on who sees the falling water, when they view it, and what difference it makes to their lives. There is no singular viewpoint on places of meaning." This special issue does not pretend to capture all the contours of such a complex and controversial story, but it does aspire to enhance our mental map of a place that now exists only in memory.

By mining historical documents, geographer and historian Cain Allen returns us to the bedrock, laying bare the geological forces that made The Dalles–Celilo reach one of the greatest fisheries and trading centers in Native North America. Mid-Columbia Indians interpreted that landscape through stories, as demonstrated by an excerpt from a Coyote tale introduced by folklorist Jarold Ramsey, and references to similar stories in contributions by artist Pat Courtney Gold (Wasco Nation), tribal lands advocate Chuck Sams (Cocopah, Cayuse, and Sioux), and anthropologist Eugene Hunn. Focusing on the vanished community of Sk'in, across the Columbia from Celilo Village, Hunn also examines the deep layers of meaning embedded in Sahaptin names for the peoples and places that once lined that stretch of the Columbia. Historical documents, traditional stories, and linguistics combine to chart a complex physical and cultural landscape, with each layer of meaning enriching the others.

Hunn further contends that "the familiar Celilo story is not only abridged but systematically distorted" unless we also remember the significance of many other sites that now lie beneath The Dalles Dam's reservoir. The essays of Courtney Gold and George W. Aguilar, Sr., (Kiksht Wasco) draw attention to the villages and fisheries of the Long Narrows, downstream from Celilo Falls, which likewise ceased to exist on March 10, 1957. Drawing on tribal oral traditions and family history, Aguilar and Courtney Gold recall the rhythms of life before the dam and voice their determination to carry on their culture. Courtney Gold has done so through her basketry, and Aguilar wrote When the River Ran Wild! to document a way of life for his family and his people. He fished in the Long Narrows from the 1930s to the 1950s, experiencing firsthand the power of the Columbia and the richness of its fisheries. Fishing and weaving are vital ways of developing relationships with the natural world, both relying on clean water — the sacred chuush of the Wáashat religion — to sustain the resources on which they depend.

Science offers another way of knowing nature and understanding place. As archaeologist Virginia Butler shows, ancient salmon bones unearthed near the now-flooded village of Wishram confirm that mid-Columbia Indians have integrated fishing into their way of life for thousands of years. She also documents how scientists and scholars have not always been mindful of Native American concerns in their efforts to collect information. In the past fifty years, however, collaborations between Indian and non-Indian experts have led to projects that richly revise our understandings of the Columbia Basin and its history. Many of the authors included in these pages have spent decades in such endeavors, and we have tried to follow their example by working with and through tribal communities to explain our purpose and identify potential contributors.

In this special issue, we begin to know more about Celilo Falls through the recollections of tribal fishers such as Alphonse "Frenchy" Halfmoon (Cayuse/Nez Perce) and Allen V. Pinkham, Sr., (Nimiipuu/Nez Perce). Their stories speak of the camaraderie that existed among men and women at work, of the pride that fishers took in being told "now you're on of us," of the value they placed on a riverscape. They tell us how things looked, smelled, and sounded, and they reveal how people negotiated the fractured physical and social geography of Celilo, which became increasingly contested as newcomers crowded in and challenged traditional patterns of family ownership.

At Celilo Falls, in the decades before The Dalles Dam, fishers and their families from the Yakama, Nez Perce, Warm Springs, and Umatilla reservations mingled not only with those who lived at Celilo Village but also with Indians from outside the Pacific Northwest and with whites who claimed a right "to fish in common" at the falls.⁹ Federal policies and court decisions often pitted the tribes against each other, producing confrontations on the water as well as in Celilo Fish Committee meetings. Some Indians came to question whether certain tribes had a right to fish at Celilo Falls or to receive compensation for its destruction, although Pinkham's essay shows how closely bound Native people were by webs of kinship and economic exchange. Born on the Nez Perce reservation, he lived most of his life among the Yakamas and spent every summer at Celilo, where his family bought salmon and helped install some of the cables that connected the islands. In his memory, the ethic of sharing that governed the fishery was as powerful as the salmon that struggled in their nets.

Others recall a fishery that had become highly fragmented by the 1940s and 1950s, when the shadow of The Dalles Dam began to loom over its future. Tommy Kuni Thompson, the last salmon chief at Celilo Falls, struggled to enforce traditional regulations and railed against the "comers" who refused to obey them. As his wife, Flora Thompson, recalls in her oral history, Chief Thompson never accepted compensation from the Corps of Engineers and resented the financial settlements made under duress by the recognized tribal governments. Johnny Jackson, the present chief of the Cascade people, expresses similar dissatisfaction with the dam settlements in his 1999 interview. "There ain't no amount of money that could ever make me leave this river," he declares, "or get away from it, or give up what I have here — the rights for my people." Historical arguments regarding who should fish at Celilo and who should be paid for its loss have transformed into debates over who should speak about the falls, who should tell the stories that continue to be so important to so many. There are no simple answers. The family of contributor Ed Edmo, Jr., a Shoshone-Bannock from Idaho, had no treaty rights at the falls. As photographer Carol Craig (Yakama) notes in her essay, however, Edmo's father chaired the Celilo Community Club during the difficult relocation talks with Corps of Engineers representatives. Ed Edmo grew up at the falls, becoming a member of the community and one of its most eloquent poets.

Benjamin Gifford photographed Native fishers spearing and netting fish on the Washington bank of the Columbia River in mid-June 1901.

OHS neg., Gi 212

Today, tribal elders such as Johnny Jackson often say that the Columbia is "sick," and they identify the destruction of Celilo as one in a long series of injustices their people and the river have suffered in the name of progress. In her interview, Elsie David translates that concern into a commitment to preserve both the land and the culture of her people for future generations. Knowledge of indigenous foodways, which depends on protecting the gifts of the Creator and teaching others how to use them, remains an important facet of maintaining identity for Native people of the Columbia Basin. Wilbur Slockish, Jr. (Klickitat Cascade), the current traditional chief of the Klickitats, speaks of the importance of customary foods and spirituality to the River People. In his oral history interview, Slockish describes how his desire to face the Creator with a clear conscience inspires his efforts to change the laws and policies that threaten this inheritance. That same sense of the sacred also infuses writer Elizabeth Woody's (Navajo/Yakama-Warm Springs) meditations on the power of place and the persistence of memory.

The phenomenal changes that 1957 wrought on the natural and cultural landscapes of the mid–Columbia River provide a touchstone for contemplating the river as a wild waterway and as an organic machine. By focusing on that year, we hope to contribute to public dialogue about the sort of future we wish for the river, its resources, and the region we share. Following the story beyond the flood allows us to see survival and renewal as well as destruction and loss. Indians continue to fish from scaffolds on the Columbia's bank and from boats in the river, as Charles Sams reminds us, using modern technology to pursue an ancient way of life and to rehabilitate damaged habitat. In 1977, twenty years after the falls disappeared, the Warm Springs, Umatilla, Yakama, and Nez Perce tribes founded the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC) to capitalize on their hard-won legal victories. They now operate their own hatcheries and environmental programs, and CRITFC has drafted an ambitious recovery plan of its own called Wy-Kan-Ush-Mi Wa-Kish-Wit 'Spirit of the Salmon'. As Ted Strong (Yakama) relates in his 2000 interview, western science has become an ally of indigenous spirituality in the fight to save the remaining salmon runs. Meanwhile, explains Corps of Engineers public affairs specialist Diana Fredlund, the Celilo Village Redevelopment Project will soon bring reliable electricity, clean water, and decent homes to the community that sacrificed so much for regional development. Visitors to the 2007 commemoration saw the new longhouse — built in the footprint of the old — where annual first-food feasts are still held to thank the Creator for the gifts of the earth and the water. Chief Olsen Meanus, Jr., says "As long as there are children here, Celilo will live."¹⁰ The falls are gone but the community endures and, as Elizabeth Woody reminds us, memory stays.

Notes

^1.Oregonian, March 11, 1957.

^2. Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 113.

^3. Personal communication with Andrew Fisher, July 18, 2006, Toppenish, Washington.

^4. Hunters quoted in Katrine Barber, Death of Celilo Falls (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 64.

^5. All of the Northwest treaties signed in 1854–1855 contained clauses virtually identical to this one from the Treaty with the Yakama: "The exclusive right of taking fish in all the streams, where running through or bordering said reservation, is further secured to said confederated tribes and bands of Indians, as also the right of taking fish at all usual and accustomed places, in common with the citizens of the Territory." Charles J. Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1904), 699.

^6. Charles F. Wilkinson, Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water, and the Future of the West (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1992), 201.

^7. Court victories included Sohappy v. Smith/U.S. v. Oregon, 1969, and U.S. v. Washington, 1974.

^8. Quoted in this issue by William L. Lang, "The Meaning of Falling Water: Celilo Falls and The Dalles in Historical Literature," Oregon Historical Quarterly 108:4 (Winter 2007), 580.

^9. As defined in the 1855 treaties. See Charles J. Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1904).

^10. Kara Briggs, "After the Deluge," Oregonian, February 17, 2007.

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