Celilo Falls: Fifteen Thousand Years, Ended in Hours

The water near this stretch of the Columbia River looks calm and unremarkable. Before March tenth, nineteen fifty-seven, it was anything but.

For approximately fifteen thousand years, Celilo Falls stood here, a series of cascades and narrow channels where the Columbia dropped through volcanic rock, creating one of the great salmon fishing sites on the continent. Archaeological evidence makes Celilo, known in the Warm Springs language as Wy-am, meaning echo of falling water, one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in North America. Tribes from across the interior West came here: the Yakama, the Warm Springs, the Umatilla, the Nez Perce, and dozens of others. They fished with dip nets and spears from platforms cantilevered out over the churning water, pulling chinook salmon from the falls in the thousands. They traded dried fish, obsidian, and goods from as far as the Great Plains and British Columbia. Celilo was not just a food source. It was an economic and cultural center of the first order.

In the treaties of eighteen fifty-five, the tribal nations explicitly reserved their right to fish at Celilo and at all their usual and accustomed places. Those rights were written into federal law and were never extinguished.

But Celilo could be flooded. The Army Corps of Engineers broke ground on The Dalles Dam in nineteen fifty-two, roughly thirteen miles downstream. Completion would raise the reservoir high enough to drown the falls entirely. The federal government negotiated cash settlements with the four treaty tribes, around twenty-six million dollars total, as compensation for the lost fishing sites, though the fishing rights themselves were theoretically preserved.

On March tenth, nineteen fifty-seven, the dam's floodgates were closed. Within hours the rising water covered Celilo Falls. People who had come to witness it, tribal members, journalists, engineers, watched in silence as fifteen thousand years of human history went under. The roar that had been audible for miles went quiet.

The falls remain submerged beneath Lake Celilo. The tribes continue to fish the river under treaty rights. The loss has never been fully accounted for.