In July 1996, two young men watching the annual hydroplane races on the Columbia River near Kennewick, stumbled across something shocking in the shallows near the shore: a human skull. It was a discovery that didn't reveal a crime scene, but rather stirred up an even greater controversy.
The skull, and its accompanying skeletal remains, were dubbed Kennewick Man by the media, or the Ancient One by the Columbia region's Indigenous peoples. Questions and debates erupted. How old was it? Was it a paleolithic man, or maybe even an ancient Polynesian, Asian or white person who wandered the Americas millennia ago? And who did the remains ultimately belong to — the government, museums or local tribes?
If nothing else, the bones became a flashpoint with enormous implications for our understanding of the peopling of the Columbia region.
Let's fast-forward to what we know. Native peoples claimed K-man as an ancestor, and they were right. In 2017, DNA testing revealed that the remains of the Ancient One were some 8,500 years old, and he had a direct ancestral connection to Indigenous people of the Columbia, specifically to the United Tribes of the Colville, who had supplied DNA samples for comparison. His human remains are thought to be among the oldest yet found in North America. He has since been buried in a secret location.
It is apt that his bones would be found along the Columbia. The river has been a major artery, a factor in both populating — and de-populating — the region. His antiquity speaks to the river's long importance to trade and settlement. Along its banks were villages, gathering places and trade connections that linked tribes throughout western North America. A major trade center at Celilo Falls on the lower Columbia was flooded by a dam project in the 20th century, but before that it was a meeting place for thousands of people, Columbia Plateau nations and traders. It was no coincidence it was a source of abundant salmon. Trade was a lifeline. Dried fish, shells, whale bone and camas were commodities that traveled east, while horses, buffalo robes and wapato flowed west. Fur trader Alexander Ross in 1811 described the Native gathering he saw as forming "the great emporium or mart of the Columbia." By the late 18th century, Western trade impacted the region. Guns, blankets, glass beads and disease made their mark on Indigenous lifeways.
"In 2017, DNA testing revealed that the remains of the Ancient One were some 8,500 years old..."
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If Columbia peoples had flourished since time immemorial along the river, diseases brought by Euro-Americans — smallpox, measles, typhoid, influenza — swept through. With colonial trade came pestilence. Starting in the late 1770s, disease from outsiders swept the Northwest coast and traveled up and down the river. It radically reduced flourishing populations. In the 1830s and 1840s a malarial disease is believed to have killed 90% of the Columbia River's remaining Indigenous population.
The Columbia acted as a gateway for newcomers. The fur trade employed English, French Canadian, Scottish, Iroquois, Metis, Hawaiian and mixed-race workers in exploring, trapping and establishing forts and trading posts. Shipwrecked Spaniards, Mexicans, Filipinos, Black sailors and Asian fishermen washed up on the coast; survivors sometimes blending into local tribes.
The great migration of mostly white Americans starting in the 1840s flooded the Oregon Trail. They put down roots for homesteads and founded towns along the river. They plied the water with steamboats. The region became a magnet for emigrants and immigrants such as the Chinese, Scandinavians and Finns as the resource economy took hold: milling, logging, salmon canning, mining and shipping crops.
It's no wonder that a Chinook-based trade language evolved — known as Chinook jargon, a mélange of Indigenous words, French and English — so that these many voices could communicate throughout the region: words like skookum for strong, chuck for water, Boston for American, and alki for by and by. The character of the river has changed utterly, but not its role in facilitating commerce, trade and human interaction.
The loss of the Indigenous river is still felt today, exemplified by the tragedy of Celilo Falls, the great rapids near The Dalles where Native people used scaffolds over the river and spears and nets to fish massive salmon runs that once traversed this section on their way to spawn upstream. This 10-mile stretch of whitewater was sacrificed to inundation by the construction of The Dalles Dam in 1957.
For thousands of years, the ancestors of Oregon Indigenous artist and poet Elizabeth Woody lived here in what was once called Wyam, which she has written means "the sound of water on rocks." The dam that drowned Celilo disrupted one of the longest continuously inhabited sites known in North America. Its fish fed people for millennia. Woody, born after the dam, writes that she has known the falls only by their absence, by the stories of their importance and abundance. She has written that she lives with its loss "much like an orphan lives hearing the kindness and greatness of his or her mother."
Woody reminds us that we are all orphans of Celilo, even if we don't know it. ♦
Knute "Mossback" Berger is editor-at-large for Crosscut.com, where this first appeared.
