Cascade Locks: Opening the Columbia

The town of Cascade Locks exists because of a stubborn stretch of whitewater. For decades, four miles of rapids at the Cascades of the Columbia blocked river traffic between Portland and the wheat-farming interior. Congress authorized a canal and lock system in eighteen seventy-six.

The Army Corps of Engineers began digging in eighteen seventy-eight, but difficult conditions and erratic funding stretched the project to nearly twenty years. On November fifth, eighteen ninety-six, the canal finally opened: ninety feet wide, three thousand feet long, with locks lifting boats past the rapids. For the first time, steamboats could travel the entire Columbia from Astoria to the agricultural lands of eastern Oregon.

The locks made the town, which took their name. In nineteen twenty-six the Bridge of the Gods, a steel cantilever span named for a Native American legend about a great stone arch that once crossed the river, was completed here, linking Oregon and Washington.