Bonneville Dam and the Fish Ladder Compromise

On September twenty-eighth, nineteen thirty-seven, Franklin Roosevelt stood at Bonneville Dam and called it a triumph of American engineering and democratic public power. He was not wrong about the engineering. The dam was the first major federal hydroelectric project on the Columbia River, a New Deal showpiece, and it generated electricity that lit homes and factories across the Pacific Northwest.

What the dedication speech did not address was the fish.

The Columbia River was, before the dams, the greatest salmon river on earth. Chinook salmon ran its length in numbers that strained credibility; historical estimates place peak runs at ten to sixteen million fish per year. Salmon were the economic and spiritual foundation of every Indigenous community from the mountains to the river's mouth. The Yakama, Warm Springs, Umatilla, Nez Perce, Chinook, and Wasco peoples had treaty rights to fish at their usual and accustomed places in perpetuity, rights reserved in the eighteen fifty-five Treaty of Walla Walla.

The dam builders knew the salmon were a problem. They built fish ladders at Bonneville as a compromise, a series of stepped pools that would allow salmon to migrate upstream past the dam. The treaty tribes were not consulted on the ladder design. The resulting structure was poorly adapted for steelhead, which climb differently than chinook. It was an engineering solution to a political problem, not an ecological one.

Bonneville also destroyed Cascade Rapids, a major Chinook fishing site at what is now Cascade Locks, immediately downstream. The fish ladder at the dam did not replace what the reservoir behind it drowned.

In the twenty years following Bonneville's completion, the Corps of Engineers built dam after dam up the Columbia and its tributaries. By the time The Dalles Dam drowned Celilo Falls in nineteen fifty-seven, the ladder at Bonneville was already a monument to an inadequate promise.