Cascade Locks: Where the Columbia River Was Tamed
Oregon
The town of Cascade Locks takes its name from a set of engineering works that were, when completed in eighteen ninety-six, among the most important on the entire Pacific Coast.
At this point in the Columbia River Gorge, the river once dropped through a chaotic stretch of whitewater known as the Cascades of the Columbia. A basalt lava flow had dammed the river here thousands of years earlier, and the water forced its way through a series of rapids and falls that were entirely impassable by boat. Everything moving up or down the river had to be portaged around this obstacle, a laborious and expensive operation that had slowed commerce and settlement in the Pacific Northwest since the first fur traders arrived.
Native peoples had fished the Cascades for thousands of years. The Cascade Chinook and Wishram peoples maintained villages at the portage sites, trading with nations from as far away as the Plains. Celilo Falls upriver was the great communal fishing ground, but the Cascades were a critical waypoint. The portage itself became a source of power and income for the tribes who controlled access.
American settlers began pushing for a canal as early as the eighteen fifties. The Army Corps of Engineers surveyed routes for decades. Construction finally began in eighteen seventy-eight and continued, off and on, through funding shortfalls and engineering setbacks, for more than fifteen years. When the locks opened in eighteen ninety-six, they let steamboats bypass the Cascades and run upriver as far as The Dalles.
The canal was eight feet deep, about four hundred sixty feet long and ninety feet wide, and it transformed the economics of the interior Pacific Northwest. Wheat from eastern Oregon and Washington could now move cheaply to Portland and the sea.
The locks were made obsolete in nineteen thirty-eight when Bonneville Dam was built just downstream, raising the river level and drowning the Cascades entirely beneath a deep reservoir. The old canal and lock walls still survive here, partially visible at low water, a monument to a problem that once seemed permanent.
