The Columbia River's Fate in the Twentieth Century

Portland State University PDXScholar History Faculty Publications and Presentations History 1-1-2000 The Columbia River's fate in the twentieth century William L. Lang Portland State University Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/hist_fac Part of the United States History Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Citation Details Lang, W. L. (2000). The Columbia River's fate in the twentieth century. Montana: The Magazine Of Western History, 50(1), 44-55. This Article is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in History Faculty Publications and Presentations by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. Please contact us if we can make this document more accessible: [email protected]. ·I··_···· """"""""'" '**"" :~R :;.A... a} I., qe!iuejas^©Da ug eqen S©Q^g !qrurnl@sQrb This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.52.75 on Fri, 7 Dec 2012 12:08:32 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Writing about another place and the materialand spiritualhas been so difficult to another era in America's past, Robert draw,our relationshipwith the riverhas been enig- Penn Warrenput it exactly right when he charac- matic, often as instrumentalas spiritual,as inspi- terized history as a relative of poetics, a way of rational as remunerative. The Columbia is the understandingthe world that engages our curios- PacificNorthwest's largest living myth and the pro- ity, challenges our intelligence, and invokes our genitor of a thousandother myths, which we have imagination. constantlyremade and have invited to remakeus. As a and environmental the Co- Historicalsense and senseshould in physical reality, poetic not, lumbiahas been our life cord. The river's the be forif is thelittle meaning end, contradictory, poetry to its humancommunities is embedded in the sto- mythwe make,history is the big mythwe live, ries we have told about the river and especially in andin ourliving, constantly remake.1 the images we have created to representit. It has Althoughhe wrote these lines in reflection on affected the human geography of our place more the Civil War, Warren thanany other force. We have couldwell havebeen writ- settledby it, builttowns along ing about our historical by Williar L. Lang it, fished it, ridden it, si- relationshipwith the Co- phoned it, bridged it, lumbiaRiver. It is a re- dammedit, and protected it. lationship that has been at the center of The Columbiais nothingif it is not a riverthat tur- people's lives in the PacificNorthwest for bulently blends the historic and poetic senses. If thousands of years, from the earliest hu- what Robert Penn Warrenwrote is correct, how man groups who fished the Columbiato we have described, understood, and used the Co- this generationwhose assaulton the river lumbia says as much about us as it does about the makesit a generatorof kilowatts,a source river. The corpus of stories we have createdstand of irrigationwater, a commercialconduit, both as a catalogof our culture'smythic vision and and a playground.Throughout the history as a measurementof the historicallypowerful effects of human engagementwith the river, there of the GreatRiver of the West. hasbeen no clearline betweenwhat we have extracted from the river in materialthings andwhat the Columbiahas meantto the spirit of the people. Because this division between Human ingenuity physically altered the Columbia River between the 189os and gg99osin staggering ways. The economic benefits gained from dams, impoundments, locks, and canals have been counterbalanced by the loss of ecosystem integrity and spiritual values attached to the river and its basin. Portending developments that put native sustenance and scenic wonders at the mercy of industrial demands was the death cult guardian spirit Tsagiglalal, or "She Who Watches" (above left, 1700-1840). At left, a worker surveys construction of Grand Coulee Dam from the vantage of a rising Bonneville transmission tower in June 1940; at right Mount Hood rises above the Columbia River in a Harper's Monthly illustration (vol. 66, December 1882, p. 8). This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.52.75 on Fri, 7 Dec 2012 12:08:32 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions MONTANATHE MAGAZINEOF WESTERNHISTORY lie relationship between the Columbia the river's influence. But what constitutes the natural and its people during this century has been and artificial on the Columbia, as historian Richard more dynamic and divisive than at any time in White recently argued, is a slippery conundrum, which the past. Between the 189os and the 199os, human in- raises additional questions about how we perceive the genuity physically altered the Columbia in stagger- river as environment and human space. ing ways. For millennia it was a river so powerful that For twelve thousand years, the Columbia's environ- only vulcanism and catastrophic Pleistocene floods ment has been the product of human and nonhuman changed its course, but applied engineering has made forces, but during the last four decades the mixture has it a mutant. Today's Columbia is characterized by become much more dynamic and confusing. Advocates massive impoundments, control gates and locks, and of the new ecology such as Daniel Botkin argue that altered ecosystems. The relationship between people human-disturbed environments are little different in and river during the twentieth century has been un- their components than their undisturbed counterparts. equal, with the Columbia suffering for its sacrifice to They are still places where natural processes and evo- human desires. In the most problematic chapter of lutionary dynamics operate and where flora and fauna the river's history, the Columbia's story is recounted exist in Darwinian niches and play out their lives. Our in measurements of sustenance or gain, its benefits perceptions of the Columbia are no less contingent. calculated in fish caught, hydropower generated, and From one angle, the river looks controlled and domes- commerce tallied. ticated, prompting us to create bold engineering meta- In its complex history, we know the river had valu- phors. From another angle, the river appears powerfully ations other than its worth in the exchange of goods or unpredictable, generative, and mesmerizing, which as a provider of industrial energy. In other stories, the stimulates us to portray it in romantic, mystical, even Columbia embodies the spiritual energy people desire utopian terms.3 from their environment-in Native American tales of Images of the river as an economic and Edenic place coyote's distribution of salmon in the Columbia River run through the earliest Euramerican descriptions of Basin, descriptions by Euramerican explorers of it as a the Columbia. English navigator and explorer George pastoral and dangerous place, and narratives about an Vancouver's men, in their fall 1792 survey of the river idealized river landscape, protected by the 1986 Co- from the mouth to near modern-day Camas, Washing- lumbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act. Making ton, wrote of the Columbia's pastoral beauty and com- sense of the Columbia's fate during the twentieth cen- mercial potential. Similarly, Meriwether Lewis and tury requires an investigation of these often contradic- William Clark described the lower portion of the Co- tory perspectives.2 lumbia, from the mouth of the Snake River to present- Two images dominate our idea of the Columbia: the day Astoria, Oregon, in terms that emphasized the river as spiritual force that inspires and moves people, fabulous wealth in anadromous fish and the opportu- and the river as cornucopian provider that creates eco- nities for entrepreneurial investment. With the onset nomic value. At the center of both images is the of "Oregon Fever" in the 1840s, the Columbia's wil- Columbia's existence as nature. The raw and often ter- derness beckoned as a place for settlement, where rible force of its current, the volume of its flow, and its Americans could extract wealth and establish homes. extensive geologic and biotic environment make the But it was the British Hudson's Bay Company that Columbia a domineering natural presence. Little that rushed to exploit the region, especially its furbearing is natural or artificial within its 259,000-square-mile animals. During the 1830s and 1840s, its descriptions drainage area, from fish and wildlife to spinning tur- and activities augmented the image of the Columbia bines and barges transporting wheat, exists outside of as a cornucopia, a place where economic gain ruled human action, where, as geographer Cole Harris has 1. Robert Penn Warren, "Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices," in Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of 4. Cole Harris, The Resettlement of British Columbia: Essays on Tradition in American Culture, ed. Michael Kammen (New York, Colonialism and Geographical Change (Vancouver, B.C., 1997), 34. 1991), 29. On Hudson's Bay Company and views of nature, see Elizabeth Vibert, 2. On the Native American landscape, see Eugene Hunn, Nch'i- Traders' Tales: Narratives of Cultural Encounters in the Columbia wana, "The Big River": Mid-Columbia Indians and Their Land (Se- Plateau, 1807-1846 (Norman, 1997), 19-21. attle, 1990); and Jarold Ramsay, Coyote Was Going There: Indian 5. Olympia Pioneer and Democrat, May 23, 1860. On the Co- Literature of the Oregon Country (Seattle, 1989). On the Columbia lumbia and early historical descriptions, see William L. Lang, "Cre- River Gorge, see Carl Abbott, Sy Adler, and Margery Post Abbott, ating the Columbia: Historians and the Great River of the West, 1890- Planning a New West: The Columbia River Gorge National Scenic 1935," Oregon Historical Society Quarterly, 93 (Fall 1992), 235-62. Area (Corvallis, Oreg., 1997). On American settlement and its effects on the lower Columbia River 3. Richard White, The Organic Machine (New York, 1995), esp.

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