The Columbia River today is tamed: Dams
regulate water for farms and generate electricity. Rapids are a
thing of the past. The wild salmon still left in the river have to
be barged upstream to spawn.
But, if you flip the pages of
William D. Layman’s coffee-table book, Native River, and
allow yourself to be teased back to an earlier era, you’ll
see a Columbia River of rapids, rock spires, steamboats, fishermen
and boulder-strewn islands. Flip some more, and names begin to
catch your eye: Ginkgo Petrified Forest, Coulee Bend, Skookumchuk
Canyon, Little Dalles, Azwell.
Layman tells of
islands saturated with petroglyphs, which now lie underwater
— images so sacred to Northwestern tribes that no one was
allowed to sit or climb upon the rocks. He describes how Captain
Fred McDermott dodged ferry cables and saved his 4-year old son
from an overboard fall at Foster Creek. He recites the tale of
“how mountain goat won coyote’s daughter” and
offers a eulogy to the tempestuous Kettle Falls, inundated when the
federal government built Grand Coulee Dam.
Layman
remembers the Middle Columbia River through historical photos and
maps and the words of pioneers, priests and American Indian
storytellers. He reminds us of a river before cumbersome dams and
fights over irrigation water.
But rather than mourning the
wild river of the 19th century — when people knew the river
for salmon and transportation, instead of electricity and
irrigation — Layman lets us wonder what the Columbia holds in
store for the 21st century.
Native River: The
Columbia Remembered, William D. Layman, Washington State
University Press, 2002. 192 pages. Hardcover: $35, Paperback:
$24.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Memories of a native river.
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