Celilo Falls, Ten Thousand Years Silenced in a Day

Beneath the surface of the Columbia River reservoir that stretches here lies one of the longest-continuously-inhabited places in North America. Celilo Falls was already ancient when the pharaohs built the pyramids. Archaeological evidence places people here fishing for salmon at least eleven thousand years ago. On March tenth, nineteen fifty-seven, all of it disappeared in a matter of hours.

For millennia, the falls formed a churning horseshoe of cataracts where the Columbia crashed through a basalt narrows, creating one of the richest salmon fisheries on earth. The village of Wyam, on the Oregon side, was a center of indigenous trade and ceremony that drew peoples from throughout the plateau, Yakama, Warm Springs, Umatilla, Nez Perce, and dozens of others. As many as five thousand people would gather in a single season to fish, trade, feast, and participate in ceremonies. Tribal fishermen stood on wooden platforms extending over the boiling water, dipping long-handled nets into the falls to catch large chinook salmon. The roar of the water was so loud that men communicated by hand signal.

The Dalles Dam changed everything. The federal government negotiated settlements with the four major treaty tribes, paying them for the loss of their fishing sites while maintaining, at least on paper, that their treaty fishing rights survived. The Warm Springs, Yakama, Umatilla, and Nez Perce tribes received a total of around twenty-six million dollars. But money could not replace a place that had organized ten thousand years of cultural and economic life.

On March tenth, nineteen fifty-seven, the floodgates closed. Witnesses on the bank watched the falls slow, then calm, then vanish beneath the rising water. The roar that generations of people had known as the background of existence went silent. Elders wept. Some said it was the end of their world as they had known it. The village of Wyam, along with the falls, lies under the waters of the reservoir today.