The Cascades Rapids

For thousands of years the Cascades Rapids were the great barrier on the Columbia River, a churning two-mile stretch of whitewater that forced every traveler, trader, and tribe to portage their goods overland. The Chinook people built their economy around the portage, controlling access and extracting tolls in trade goods. Lewis and Clark portaged here in eighteen oh five and again in eighteen oh six.

The Oregon Trail era brought thousands of emigrants scrambling over the basalt. By the eighteen fifties, competing portage railroad lines ran on both banks, the first railroads in the Pacific Northwest, built entirely to move cargo around this single stretch of river. In nineteen thirty-eight the Bonneville Dam backed the Columbia's waters up to a depth that swallowed the rapids completely.

The violent water is gone, but the flat pool above the dam marks exactly where the barrier used to be.