Wishram: The Great Mart of the Columbia

When Lewis and Clark reached the stretch of the Columbia River between Celilo Falls and Beacon Rock in October eighteen oh five, they found a population density unlike anything else they saw along that passage. It was the densest population they encountered anywhere on the entire journey from the Missouri River to the Pacific. The reason was salmon, and the reason was trade.

The village the Wishram people called Nixluidix, meaning the trading place, sat on the north bank of the Columbia just downstream from Celilo Falls. The falls themselves were a natural fish trap: salmon surging upstream hit the cascade and concentrated in the churning water below it, making them easy to net, spear, and dry. Tribes from across the Pacific Northwest came to fish and trade every summer: Nez Perce from the plateau country to the east, Yakama from the north, Chinook from the coast to the west, and peoples from as far as the Great Plains and northern California. Lewis and Clark described a great emporium where all the neighboring nations assemble.

The Wishram people were Upper Chinook speakers who had occupied this stretch of river for several thousand years. Their petroglyphs, etched into the basalt canyon walls, depicted the animals and ceremonies that shaped their world. When construction of The Dalles Dam began in the nineteen fifties, the Army Corps of Engineers moved several petroglyph panels from the soon-to-be-flooded canyon walls to Columbia Hills State Park, where they can still be seen. The dam closed its gates on March tenth, nineteen fifty-seven, and within hours Celilo Falls went silent beneath the reservoir. A fishing and trading hub that had sustained human life for millennia was submerged in a single afternoon. Elders who had fished the falls their whole lives stood on the bank and watched the water rise.