Fort Cascades
Oregon
In eighteen fifty-five the U.S. Army built a small blockhouse called Fort Cascades on the Washington bank of the Columbia to protect the portage road around the Cascades Rapids.
The timing could not have been worse. The following spring, in what became known as the Cascades Massacre, Yakama warriors attacked the portage settlement, killing seventeen settlers and soldiers and besieging the survivors until troops arrived the next day. The attackers burned the fort in that raid, and the army reinforced the portage afterward.
Almost nothing stands today, but the site marks the moment when the Columbia River corridor, still largely a fur-trade waterway a decade earlier, became a contested military frontier.
