March 10, 1957. The gates of the new dam at The Dalles close and the Columbia River behind it begins to rise. The dam has been built to capture the river’s energy (to electrify the Northwest) and its water, (to irrigate the dry land east of the Cascades).
Over the next eight hours the dam’s backwater rose and Celilo Falls — or Wyam, to the people who had lived and fished there for more than 11,000 years — disappeared forever. Tribal elders stood on the cliffs chanting death songs. The only known visual record of the inundation is a series of slides taken from the cliffs overlooking the river. You can see the water rising. Now the lower rocks disappear. Now the river passes the top of the falls. Now the river grows still. That’s the last slide.
One woman, a small girl at the time, remembers hearing crying and wailing, like at a funeral. She was confused. Who died? she asked. Who died?
Celilo Falls was twelve miles east of The Dalles on the Columbia River. The falls were a series of chutes and islands. Many photos of Celilo are of Horseshoe Falls, the largest and closest fall to the Oregon shore. The rest of Celilo Falls tumbled 20 feet off of basalt boulders and roiled around Kiksa Island, Chief Island, and Big Island. Celilo Village abutted Horseshoe Falls and was for many years a string of tents, cabins, and temporary huts for drying salmon. Before the inundation, Celilo Village extended from the Celilo Canal, now under the river, to the cliffs. Railroad tracks and a two-lane highway sliced through the village. Most of the buildings were on the south side of the highway near the river, where the winds were better for drying fish.
In the summer, during prime fishing season, the village population swelled a hundredfold, but in the winter it shrank as the residents went up the Deschutes to escape the wind, or scattered to reservations and towns more hospitable in the cold. In the 1930s, filmmakers from the Oregon Historical Society counted more than eighty structures at the Village and twelve families who used the Village year-round. In Celilo’s last years, in the early 1950s, more than five thousand people still relied on fishing at Celilo for their livelihoods — a significant portion of the 30,000 Indians that the Bureau of Indian Affairs estimated lived in the entire Pacific Northwest.
Many of the Indians who gathered at Celilo called themselves River People, although today most are enrolled in tribes with reservations far from the river. The Wasco people, for instance, traditionally lived on the Columbia, but the Treaty of 1855 pooled them with the far-flung Paiute and Warm Springs tribes and moved them to a reservation in central Oregon, more than ninety miles from the river that nurtured generations of their people. Right at Celilo Falls is the homeland of the Wyam, a tribe that was never explicitly included in treaties and whose people refused to be moved to a reservation. When these tribes and many others came together at Celilo to fish, they formed an unusual community of nations, linked by their connection to the river.
At the heart of Celilo was the salmon, and without a doubt Celilo Falls was the best fishing hole on earth. At one point, more than 20 million salmon traveled up the Columbia each year to spawn. Fishing was open at the falls from May to September each year, and the most productive run of salmon came in the fall. In March and April, the prized spring chinook run began, followed by the blueback salmon, which peaked in early July. Just as the blueback run began to fade, steelhead trout came on, joined by fall chinook, coho, and the occasional sturgeon in September. Prior to the 1930s, the legendary “June hogs,” which weighed up to fifty pounds, also ran; the June hogs went extinct when the Grand Coulee dam blocked their spawning path.
The falls were so loud that fishermen communicated through sign language. The river’s spray spewed far enough to keep the basalt cliffs green on the other side of the village, despite the desert heat. And the smell…not only did the dry huts reek of rotting fish, but sewage processing and plumbing at the village were primitive, and for years residents walked up the highway to a gas station for fresh drinking water.