The Bonneville Dam and the End of Celilo Falls

Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the Bonneville Dam on September twenty-eighth, nineteen thirty-seven, the same afternoon he dedicated Timberline Lodge. The dam was the first federal multipurpose dam on the Columbia River, part of the New Deal's infrastructure ambition, and it did what its architects promised: it electrified the Pacific Northwest, powered aluminum production for the war effort, and became the foundation of regional economic development for the rest of the twentieth century.

It also began the end of Celilo Falls.

Celilo Falls, fourteen miles upstream from The Dalles, was the most important Indigenous fishing site on the Columbia River. For thousands of years, Chinook and other Columbia River nations had gathered there each spring and fall for salmon runs, dipping nets and spears from wooden platforms over the falls' roaring channels. The site was not merely an economic resource. It was a center of trade, ceremony, and political life for nations across the Columbia Plateau.

The Bonneville Dam disrupted salmon runs immediately. The fish ladders built into the dam were an engineering compromise that mitigated but did not solve the disruption. Salmon populations that had supported Indigenous communities for millennia began to decline.

Twenty years later, The Dalles Dam finished what Bonneville had started. When it was completed in nineteen fifty-seven, the reservoir behind it rose and submerged Celilo Falls entirely. The falls, which had run for at least fifteen thousand years and had been one of the oldest continuously occupied sites in North America, went underwater in a single afternoon.

The sound of Celilo Falls, which elders described as audible from miles away, is not in the public record. No recording was made before the falls drowned. What they sounded like is not established in any archive.