The Falls

Fifty years ago the roaringest wildest most vigorous waterfall there ever was in Oregon went silent.

A eulogy.

By Angela Sanders

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.

To fish, a fisherman dipped his net into the white water of the river, lifted it, and dipped again until he caught a salmon. Depending on his spot in the river, he might also use a larger dip net and hold it, rather than move it against the current, and wait for salmon to swim in. He then lifted the salmon to the platform, clubbed it with a wooden bat, and then relinquished his place at the platform to the next fisherman in line. This ancient method yielded over 2.6 million pounds of salmon a year at Celilo.

Fishermen used a network of 480 platforms perched along the riverbanks and across Celilo’s rocky islands. Families owned some of the platforms, but others were open for rotating use. Eventually most fishing platforms were fitted with rope that the fishermen could slip over their waists so they wouldn’t fall into the turbulent river. In the early years, Indians canoed across the river to reach platforms on Kiksa and Big islands and to haul their catch back to the Village for drying. Later, fish buyers constructed cables to prime fishing spots with baskets attached to carry the fisherman and his catch.

Often it was job of the women to haul burlap sacks of salmon, sometimes weighing as much as two hundred pounds, to the village to clean and hang in the drying sheds. When a platform was empty, boys might grab a dip net to catch a salmon or two, sometimes leaving them to rot in the sun. Other Indian children caught lamprey and cooked them on sticks. The fishing operations at Celilo became a tourist attraction, and after the Pendleton Round-Up each year, truckloads of people stopped at Celilo on their way home.

The Army Corps of Engineers knew from the beginning that a dam at The Dalles would destroy Celilo, and knew too that according to treaties from the mid-19th century, Indians there had the right to use Celilo Falls for fishing in perpetuity. To build the dam, the Corps bought out the tribes’ fishing rights for a payment of $3,754.91 per person — less than many fishermen earned in a season. In protest, some people, including Wyam Chief Tommy Thompson (who ruled for an astounding 82 years, from 1875 through his death in 1959), refused to cash their checks. When Chief Thompson died, more than a thousand people came to his funeral, and his widow cashed the government’s check at last to pay for his burial.

In 1987, for the thirty-year anniversary of the inundation, the Bonneville Power Administration looked into opening The Dalles dam to lower the Columbia and reveal the falls for a day. Since then, other people have campaigned to bring back Celilo, but they, like the BPA, discovered that the tribes wanted Celilo left alone. “Why bring back the pain?” many of the Indians who remember Celilo say. After all, on their last day of fishing, many fishermen threw their dip nets into the water as they left their platforms.

When Ian McCluskey went to Celilo Village in 1999 to make his documentary, Echo of Water Against Rocks: Remembering Celilo Falls, he learned that the pain runs so deep that some of the Indians don’t even want to talk about the falls. But one woman told him this: “I used to hear the roar of the falls when I woke. The roar of the falls when I went to sleep. The roar of the falls when I went to the bathroom. Now all I hear is silence, and I can’t get the silence out of my head.”

It is unlikely that Celilo Falls will ever reappear. According to the Army Corps of Engineers, even if the dam at The Dalles were opened full bore, the river could never drain low enough to bring the falls back again. And even if the dam disappeared, Celilo Falls wouldn’t be the same; before the dam gates closed, the Corps dynamited the rocks of the falls to even out what would become the river’s bed.

An old Wasco story tells of two wicked sisters living on an island in the Columbia who dammed the river to steal salmon before they reached Celilo Falls. Coyote saw what was going on and disguised himself as a baby floating in the water so that the sisters would take him home. When the sisters left for the day to fish, Coyote worked feverishly to dig away the dam.

Coyote won that one; but fifty years ago, when the dam at The Dalles closed its gates, the River People were not so lucky.

Angela Sanders is a writer in Portland whose wonderful essay on the Paul Bunyan statues of the West graced the Summer 2004 issue.