The Deschutes People: Warm Springs and Northern Paiute

The river that runs through the center of Bend has carried several names, and each one tells a different chapter of the same story. The Nez Perce, who knew this country well, called the Deschutes River Towarnehiooks, a word that translates roughly as enemies, because the Northern Paiute, a people they regarded as rivals, lived along its banks. The Wasco people and the Warm Springs bands also traveled and fished along the river for thousands of years before any European ever arrived here.

French Canadian fur trappers of the early eighteen hundreds gave the river the name it carries today. They called it the Riviere des Chutes, the River of the Falls, for the falls near its mouth on the Columbia. That French name eventually became Deschutes.

The peoples who lived here the longest were part of what became the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, a coalition of Wasco, Warm Springs Sahaptin, and Northern Paiute bands who were placed on a reservation near the Deschutes, the Wasco and Warm Springs bands under an eighteen fifty-five treaty signed under pressure and the Northern Paiute from eighteen seventy-nine. That treaty reserved their rights to fish the Deschutes and its tributaries. Their descendants are still federally recognized and self-governing today.

The high desert plateau around Bend had been home to people for roughly twelve thousand years before Alexander Drake platted his townsite in the early nineteen hundreds. That twelve thousand year human presence is an important part of what Bend sits on, even if the logging era founding story often crowds it out.