This program is made possible by Thurston Charitable Foundation and Oregon Public Broadcasting
with additional support from Fales Foundation and viewers like you.
The Columbia River area is special just because it's such an incredibly beautiful spot.
The most powerful, majestic part of our whole region.
It's very nice being on the river.
Just lifts your whole spirits for the day.
The Columbia River is a tremendous asset to the state.
It's stupendous really.
The river is fascinating.
Was the life of our people.
Power is turning our darkness to dawn.
There's no place like this in the world.
Are we going to try to protect it?
We came to the head of the Columbia River near the foot of a steep secondary mountain
surrounded by fine grassy plain by its source in a fine lake.
All is amongst stupendous and solitary wilds covered with eternal snow and mountains connected
to mountains with immense glaciers, the collection of the ages.
The most fantastic part of the Columbia is where it starts at Canal Flat.
Then it comes into the Columbia Lake and then from there it flows into Lake Windermere and
then broadens out and narrows as it comes down the 40 miles that comes to here.
It's about 40 miles.
And that's the end of my trapline is where that boat is.
I have five miles of trapline.
Goes down to the end of that.
But I think this whole mountain that I have.
There's a beaver on right here going right back in the bush and there he's come out of
the river right there.
I think I'll set a trap right here.
Should be good place.
We've been trapping our trapline for 80, 82 years and for the last two years I haven't
caught any baby beaver.
And this is because they've been shooting the male beaver.
I opened I think it was nine female beaver last year and not one of them had a baby inside
of them.
I'm still shearing my sheep.
I mean those are the things that are just every day to me.
All you have to say you've got to do it and you'll do it.
That's what I did in the chicken house roof.
I went up and faced the chicken house roof but I slipped coming down off it.
But I said I got to do it.
They've offered me $550,000 for this place.
What do I need that much money for?
I like it here.
I like the view, I just love it.
I live where the Columbia River pours into the Lower Arrow Lake.
The teepee out on the flats was put there to say some things to the community and hundreds
of people came up to me as the waters of the lake rose around this teepee, inquired if
it was mine and wanted to know if the lake was going to overwhelm the teepee.
It created a sort of social tension as the waters of the lake rose closer and closer
to this teepee.
The lake level is controlled by dam and castle gar and the dam and castle gar seems to be
controlled by someone's whim.
There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason how the lake goes up and down.
Canada stores water in three storage dams in British Columbia and operates it jointly
with the U.S. to deliver that water to the border that is then used in downstream power
plants.
Basically, we have sold the water to the United States so that they can use it how they please.
Canada receives half the increase in the firm energy capability of those downstream plants.
It's difficult to maintain any kind of shore-based facility because the lake has a tide that
goes up and down 40 or 50 feet.
When you have a storage reservoir, somebody likened it to a bathtub, you fill it up and
then drain it out.
They established the high water mark, cut down every living thing between the high water
mark and where the lake was, which meant that all of the homes or farms, all of the buildings
were either moved or burned down.
My house was put on four old logs and dragged up by a cat.
When these deals were done 30 years ago, the kinds of values that were taken into account
were quite different from the ones that are so prominent today.
The negotiators looked at power and flood control and a little bit of irrigation and
the rest of the concerns that we worry about now, fisheries and wildlife and recreation,
got extremely short shrift.
Twenty years later, local people look on some of these things as being some kind of bizarre
joke.
We've made as many as 60 teepees a year.
My employees are all local people and we try and keep as much of the money as possible
here, so we tend to sell globally and produce locally.
I've sold teepees in Japan, Germany, United States, all over Canada, but I'm always amazed
at where we get orders from.
I couldn't imagine at this point living anywhere else.
Nowhere that I have gone even begins to compare with what I see here.
There's a great and peaceful river in a land that's fair to see, where the dog whispered
three whispers to the snow-capped mountain breeze.
And the cliffs are solid granite and the valley is always green.
This is just as close to heaven as my traveling feet have been.
Because fur trappers spent the better part of their lives in Indian country, many married
Indian women through informal arrangements with the bride's father, perhaps a horse,
glittering beads and a scarlet cloth for a dowry.
Without offending public opinion, he could also divorce her as casually as he married.
He simply told her to go home and she went.
Despite the ease of marriage and separation, many marriages developed into lasting and
devoted unions.
Most brides were excellent travelers, could dress skins, make clothing and haul much weight.
He had wit, earthy humor and could tell serial stories of mystery and adventure.
When a new Indian bride was brought to the fort, she went through a cleansing ritual
designed to render her more pleasing to her new white partner.
She was scoured of grease and paint and her leather garments were exchanged for those
of more European style.
Gentlemen of the fur trade were sensitive to any suggestions they might be behaving
in an uncivilized manner by marrying Indian women.
Fort Colville, near Kettle Falls, was a major fur trading center and in 1840 trappers began
introducing their wives to the table.
Chief Factor John Work, who married the daughter of a French voyageur and Spokane Indian, felt
fortunate in his choice of a wife.
Well, the little wife and I get on well.
She is to me an affectionate partner, simple and uninstructed as she is and takes good
care of my children and myself.
A lot of the French Canadian fur trappers did marry a lot of Indian women, so we have
a lot of our tribal members with French Canadian ancestry.
The Kettle Falls area was one of the biggest trading areas in the Northwest.
The salmon was utilized by our local Indian tribes for bartering with other Indian tribes.
So the Columbia River really was kind of the lifeblood of the Indians in the Northwest.
It was a free flowing river before the dams were built.
It represented a part of our tribal culture because of the salmon runs that came up the
river.
A lot of them say that they could almost walk across the river on the backs of the salmon.
The tribal members in those pre-Grand Coulee days were concerned about the loss of the
salmon fishery, but I think at that time it was decided that it wasn't cost effective
to put in a fish ladder at Grand Coulee, Grand Coulee being of course the highest and largest
dam in the world at the time.
No fish got beyond Grand Coulee Dam and there went our fishery.
It created the reservoir behind Grand Coulee which is now called Lake Roosevelt.
Those that were living on the river, they had to move to higher ground and they even
had to move to communities on the reservation.
It completely changed the way of life of our tribal members.
In 1951, our tribe filed a suit against the federal government for the wrongs that Grand
Coulee Dam had done to us.
After 50 some years, we have finally reached a settlement on the whole issue of Grand Coulee
Dam and their use of the Columbia River that borders our reservation.
That's a good river, just needs a couple dozen more big power dams on it, keeping folks busy.
They say that that is probably the finest piece of concrete work anywhere in the world,
the best concrete, the strongest concrete.
So I feel good about it, always have and always will.
It was depression times you know when they started this and times pretty tough and people
who wanted work they could get it here.
There was people from many different states here, I knew a lot of fellows from North Dakota
that came out here to work and I think the dam was really started as a project to give
people work and it was under President Roosevelt of course and he was trying to get the country
back going again after the depression you know and well it was still going really.
To me I think it was one of the most wonderful projects that was ever built in this country.
Some of the people were up pretty high and the iron workers and those people they had
some pretty dangerous jobs were they.
I think it was about 70 some odd people that were killed on the job which is quite few
compared to what the thing that they did I thought.
A lot of people always ask the question, any people buried in the concrete?
Well that's no, nobody.
We were pretty proud of it, I think when everybody worked here was pretty proud of it.
And during the war it's a good thing they had it in my estimation.
They needed power desperately during the war to build airplanes, ships and everything else.
The water comes splashing through the dam trickling down across the land.
Powerhouse sings, generator whines, down the hill comes a big power line.
This whole Pacific Northwest country up in here ought to be run the way I see it by electricity.
Well folks need houses and stuff to eat and the folks need metals and the folks need wheat.
The folks need water and power dams, the folks need the people and the people need the land.
One of the interesting things about the basalt columns out here is there are massive lava
flow at one point and the columns cooled and now you can see just this stratification going
down with the ripple lines going through them, it's really beautiful.
One of the negative things about that is that volcanic rock is generally fairly unstable
so it tends to break away and chip away so you have to be careful that you don't pull
off removable handholds.
And I think partially it attracts people who like to be in control and you learn to control
your fear and you learn to control the environment that you're in.
The interesting thing when you come out through here is this trail down through the rock and
I know of no other place around like this.
For a climbing area usually you're climbing up something but the topography relief here
reaches downwards and once you're down there you can start your climb.
It sort of feels like some of these blocks are loose, strong concentration, ah relief,
thank you rock.
The next clip looks like about 20 feet out.
It's sort of stressful but very relaxing, merely meditative.
We've been fortunate enough to raise a world champion mare here on the farm then it's
an excellent place to raise horses.
It provides good forage of course if you put water on it and they're just able to thrive.
We just tried a small operation to begin with to get a few horses in and you start doing
a few things with regard to training and raising and breeding them and ultimately over the
period of time it ended up to be a nationally recognized farm.
Almost everybody that comes here comments wow look at the space and look at the river.
They know that horses have always inspired a sense of free will and that the Columbia
River is certainly the most powerful majestic part of our whole region and that it exhibits
that same sense of strength and free will even though we have done quite a job of trying
to hold it back in many ways and we have.
I recognized the appropriateness of this site as being authentic wild horse country and
the sense of horses that are untamed and running free have always inspired many people.
It's a metaphor about how our own lives are free spirited.
For the river to be given back some of its freedom I hope that can happen in the future.
We may be able to harness the power of the sun in such a way that we can take out the
dams.
Our health as a culture is going to be reflected in how we treat the river and if the river
has no salmon swimming up it then we've failed.
I think everyone realizes the salmon issue is important but we all feel that there needs
to be a rational balance and we've seen this balance erode.
All of the farmers I know in the Columbia Basin are very concerned about the stability
of their water allocation.
We all know that without that allocation we wouldn't be here.
It's part of the Columbia Basin project so all the water comes from Grand Coulee Dam
and is distributed through the 500 plus thousand acres of the Columbia Basin.
Down here it was all broken out of sagebrush.
Obviously we think it would be a real disaster if agriculture was shorted in their allocation.
I don't think anyone is asking for any more water, they're just asking for guaranteed
protection of what we already have.
In this particular ranch we have 140 acres in the organic certification program and it
serves us particularly well here because we're a new area, there aren't a lot of the
pest problems that some of the older growing districts would have to face.
The river is a tremendous resource, it's probably been the single most important attribute or
resource to the state's economy.
I'm a little bit ambitious too, I would like to have my own orchard some day in the future.
I'm a resident alien right now, but yeah I've been thinking about becoming a USA citizen,
I don't know, someday in the future.
You know in Mexico you can make only about $10 a day or something like that and over
here you can make $60, $70, even $80 or $100 a day.
It's pretty hard work, especially picking, being with a 50 pounds bag on their shoulders
for nine hours or eight to nine hours, yeah it is pretty heavy.
You're not going to see any white people or Asians or someone else come to pick apples.
I've only been seeing Hispanic people.
The illegal people are the ones that are making the jobs over here.
We can't discriminate anybody because everybody shows a card over here.
They're not the cops or anything, so we have to hire those guys.
Anyway, we have to pick the crop, we have to get the crop and those guys are showing
something that they can work.
Anywhere you walk on the meadow over here you can see about 90% Mexican people.
I love nature, it's very nice being on the river just with my kids, playing with my kids,
my wife on the river, it's just real nice.
During World War II, the first plutonium for atomic bombs was produced at Hanford.
It now has the largest accumulation of radioactive waste in the western world.
55 million gallons of highly radioactive waste are stored in 177 underground tanks, 67 of
which are known or suspected to have leaked waste into surrounding soil.
1,100 individual contaminated areas are identified, some leaching into the river.
Storage basins close to the river need to be moved.
It will take 40 years to clean up with an estimated cost of $60 billion.
Isn't it ironic that we came in here to build an atomic bomb?
Fence this whole area off and now that area is long gone, we've got some waste to clean
up now, but isn't it something because of that, we're sitting on some of the greatest
wildlife habitat left, I mean this is it.
You can't hardly come up to this river without seeing deer, coyote, badger here, there's
beaver now again, golden eagle, of course they feed on the salmon, you have to understand
there's probably only maybe 6% of nearly 600 square miles of this real estate that was
ever really contaminated, so there's miles and miles and miles of uncontaminated areas
here for wildlife.
We've had the federal government protecting this land.
Pretty soon that's going to go away, some of these lands are going to be accessed and
accessed to water who we're not sure, and what are we going to do with it, are we going
to try to protect it?
14 dams on this river, this is the last stretch we got, this is the last free flowing stretch,
and I'm 61 years old, and the scary part about that has been the majority of all those dams
have been built since I've been here.
This is the only thing we have left to look back into the past and actually realize what
a river looked like.
We've got 51 miles here of flowing river, that's the most important spawning grounds
left in the Columbia River.
That's the most important spawning ground left in the United States for fall Chinook
salmon.
In no way should this area be developed.
You know this is public land, we're not taking this land away from anybody, because we already
own it.
It's the people over in Seattle, it's the people in Oregon, we all own this land.
And we need to protect it for the future generations.
Proceeded on seven miles to the junction of this river, the Snake, and the Columbia which
joins from the northwest.
We halted to smoke with Indians who had collected there in great numbers to view us.
Past three large lodges on the starboard side, near which great numbers of salmon was drying
unscaffold.
Near the entrance of one of those mat lodges, I saw many squaws engaged in splitting and
drying salmon.
Those people appears to live in a state of comparative happiness.
They take a greater share in the labor of the women, and I am informed or content with
one wife.
Those people are also those of the flatheads.
They appear of mild disposition and friendly disposed.
At four o'clock we set out down the great Columbia accompanied by our two old chiefs,
saw a mountain bearing southwest conical form covered with snow.
Soon after we landed which was at a few willow trees, Indians came from the different lodges
and a number of them brought wood which they gave us.
We smoked with them and two of our party played on the violin which delighted them greatly.
Their dress are similar to those at the fork except their robes are smaller and do not
reach lower than the waist.
Every quarter of them have scarcely any robes at all.
Now there's a full million horses charged with electric power.
Day and night they'll run the factories and they never will get tired.
Well a coal mine gets dug out and an oil well it runs dry.
Knuckle Sam will find his power where the river meets the sky.
You know most of the jobs out here the guys haven't over yet you know simply for their
strength but breaking the pot I mean I'm not as good as they are you know so like that.
It's harder for a woman to get started than it is for a man because to me they tell me
something you know I don't even know what they were talking about you know but it gets
better.
Well my first husband he started here first and my second husband works here.
I have a son that works here, I have a step son that works here, I have nephews that work
here.
It's very family-oriented around here.
Most of the people that live in Goldendale they live they work in this plant.
All of our mills are shut down so this is it.
When you get your pure aluminum that's pouring out it's beautiful silver.
You know we do use a lot of electricity but we also supply a lot of jobs for this area.
No matter how you're feeling you know you can come down and see that river and it just
lifts your whole spirits for the day.
It's just a beautiful river for sports and fun.
The sheer energy that Sam Hill has captured in building on this location, the energy of
his vision seeing that this part of the United States both Oregon and Washington would be
of tremendous interest to tourists.
It's stupendous really.
Sam Hill married the daughter of James J. Hill of the Great Northern Railway.
Her name was Mary and they had a daughter Mary and thus we have the name Mary Hill for
this museum.
When he designed a home he designed it as a mansion.
Prior to his actually living here his friends in the art community persuaded him to turn
it into a museum.
One of those ladies was Queen Marie of Romania and she in turn was able to introduce him
to a lot of titled people who had art collections and she herself with her retinue traveled
by train across the United States to this very very remote location in 1926 and dedicated
the museum for her very good friend.
It's always with a sense of amazement that visitors walk into our Rodin Gallery and some
of them because of our remote location have even been known to ask are you sure these
Rodins are real?
Well I can assure you that they are.
Sam Hill had been brought up in the Quaker faith, a very firm believer in peace between
human beings.
He was terribly appalled by the carnage of World War I.
He was visiting Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in England and part of the legends surrounding
Stonehenge are that it was a sacrificial location.
He realized that young men were still being sacrificed at this time to the God of War
so he determined to build Stonehenge as a monument to the fallen of World War I.
After throwing away a good many things and burning up most of the deck boards of our
wagons so as to lighten them, got my washing and cooking done and started on again.
Crossed two branches of streams, have camped near the gate of the Cascade Mountains where
I was sick all night caused by my washing and working too hard.
When I would go across the Hood River Bridge sometimes I just stop on the other side and
look down and just kind of draw a deep breath.
All up and down the river I think there are these fantastic, magnificent vistas that you
just don't have with at least any other river that I've been associated with.
There's something about it that's good for my soul and I know that I was working on,
as I was working on both novels, when I would come up and look over various parts of the
Columbia it would kind of give me the inspiration to write another section.
You get that low-lying clouds and the kind of mist and so forth, I mean that's one mood
certainly to the river.
Another mood is, as it is today, windy and with the sail boards out behind us, really
spectacular.
I grew up in the Dalles and I grew up with my grandparents there but I think that a lot
of people didn't realize that when they closed the floodgates on the Dalles Dam that would
be the end of Salilo Falls.
And I think one of the things that as a writer I tried to do was think about that change
that happened and then capture on paper a memory of that so it's preserved.
People realized that there was this great fishery here, the greatest fishery in the
North American continent, where Native American people from as far away as Minnesota would
come to trade, to fish, to gamble, to gossip, young men, to go out with young women and
so forth.
Jack looked over the flat waters of Salilo Lake towards the Dalles Dam.
I bet that used to be some wild river, he said.
It roared through the old channel, Danny said, and it was always dangerous, currents and
eddies everywhere.
You saw the water devils, even with those warnings so many people drowned.
Sammy said that when he was a kid he had to keep away from the river at night.
His parents warned him, the dead might pull him down.
Cliquetat Falls is a miniature version of the Salilo Falls.
Down here in Cliquetat it's deep, fast, white water, and this is the last of our dipping
like they dipped in Salilo.
Now if we don't wear our safety robes we've got the possibility of getting jerked in.
We've got big fish in the Cliquetat, and if somebody falls and then drowns in the water
and the fish comes up by them and rubs on them, it might affect our body.
So a lot of our fishermen don't fish if there's a body in the river.
We believe in our religion, our culture, and that's what people say, well it's just superstition.
Well it's superstition to you, it's not to us.
You think back about Salilo, that's no more now, and you know, it's just sad.
There's not too many of us that come to the Cliquetat to fish because it's a mean river,
you know, you don't watch what you're doing.
And if you're not prepared, the river will take you.
Some of us are providers for many families, and it's a way of life for us that we share
everything that we catch.
The runs aren't really down critical, but they're getting down there, and the main thing
is the dam, you know, takes part of our fish, sportsmen take part of our fish, we don't
argue with them, they pay for their fish, they don't like it because we don't pay for
our fish, but it's an aboriginal right for us to fish, and our people have done this
for centuries and upon centuries.
The spring fish is the most important animal in our culture.
He goes through all kinds of obstacles, our ocean fisheries, our coastal fisheries, natural
predators, and he comes back.
He represents our life, our style.
We fight, we fight to survive, just like our fish fights to survive in the conditions that
he is put in.
With all the people at the mouth of the river, it's holding our fish back into the deeper
main stem of the Columbia River.
They're holding out in there, and they wait for the dark time to get so they can, when
the people get out of the river, out from the mouth of the river, then our fish start
coming up again.
The mouth of the river is getting packed with windsurfers, and nowadays the stress on the
river is becoming more and more.
A lot of the sites, the windsurfing sites, along the river are in jeopardy of being closed
in certain areas where it apparently is harming the fishing, or is becoming a danger, or is
becoming a nuisance.
Here in the gorge, people come from everywhere.
It's really nice to be here.
Much better than Tokyo.
I'd say it's the windsurfing capital of North America, but there's a whole other life going
on here aside from windsurfing, with all the logging that goes on, and a lot of the fruit
industry here, and thousands of orchards up in the hills.
It's not just a windsurfing place.
That causes a little tension sometimes, because windsurfing is a relatively new sport, and
if you go into old downtown Hood River, which once was hardware stores and railroads, and
now every store is a windsurfing shop, it causes a little bit of tension.
Hood River is kind of like, I don't know, nirvana, or heaven to windsurfers, I guess.
In the summertime, it's so consistently windy, and the good windsurfers come here, and they
realize that, wow, I've really had my abilities challenged in the gorge.
First time you're up on the board, and you actually start moving with the wind, you know
why you spent so many hours falling in the water.
So people will call it intense, unreal, radical.
What people experience is being right on the edge of control, because you just feel like
one bigger gust of wind, or one bigger swell in front of you, and you're going to explode.
I finished law school last spring in May, and took the bar in July in California, and
then I came up here for a break and met the person that I'm now going to be marrying,
a fellow windsurfer.
I mean, it's a lifestyle, it really is.
It totally changed my life.
The Columbia River area is special just because it's such an incredibly beautiful spot.
I mean, it's nestled in between Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams, and you watch all these barges
going back and forth, coming from Wayland and going out to Portland, and you kind of
see it as a lifeline.
At Bonneville, now there are ships in the locks, the waters have risen and cleared all
the rocks.
Ship loads aplenty will steam past the docks, so roll on, Columbia, roll on.
To me, the Columbia River is like the aorta on the west coast, it is the lifeblood of
everything that lives here.
The river is a transportation link, it's the water that creates a huge agricultural
boom in the center, in the desert part, and it comes from tributaries north and south,
east and west, for hundreds of thousands of square miles, it's the lifeblood.
When we came to Clickitat County, here in the Columbia Gorge, 20 years ago, we bought
a cattle ranch, and after about three years of droughts and bad prices, my wife and I
invented a board game about farming called the Farming Game, and we've sold several
hundred thousand copies of that.
It's part of a variety of ways that we've learned how to make a living here, and we
run a 2,000 acre cattle ranch.
I would be hard pressed to find anywhere in the world that would be a finer place, both
socially and environmentally, to raise kids.
But we as parents have done a lot of work with them inside and outside of school.
We sent all four of them to school knowing how to read.
Our oldest son went from our little high school in Goldendale, Washington, to Yale University,
and I'd say that's doing okay.
Yeah, Phil, you've been driving this truck now since you were what, about five years
old?
Yeah.
You're getting better.
You're getting better with age.
Like a cheese or something.
Yeah.
Are you okay or what?
You look okay.
I think the only newborn is that one back there in the grass.
Everyone has always said here this is the best place in the world to live if you can
only figure out how to make a living.
In 1986, Congress passed the National Scenic Area Act, the Columbia Gorge National Scenic
Area Act, to protect the scenic, natural, cultural, and recreation resources of an area
that's about 80 miles long and encompasses about 300,000 acres.
I represent Quikotet County on the commission, and there's no place like this in the world,
and it's our job, both on the commission, the Columbia Gorge Commission, and it's also
our job as citizens to leave this place better than we found it.
Every time you come to the Gorge, it's an adventure, and my car doesn't want to go
anywhere else, and so I let it have its way, which means we go to the Gorge.
That was just a spot that had been damaged during freeway construction and had never
been repaired, and it was just a bunch of rock.
One day in 1988, I went by, and somebody had cut down a couple of the pine trees that were
the only living things in that whole area, and I thought, gee, now we've got to do something
about it.
So with the cooperation of the Oregon Department of Transportation, we've been able to start
it through rehabilitation, and we collect seed from this area of the Gorge and only
plants that grow within one-mile radius of that place.
We seed it in November, rake them in, and then wait and see what happens.
It certainly looks better than it used to.
As part of the Scenic Area Act, now there are several thousand acres of public land
for people to enjoy, and next year, 25 years from now, 50 years from now, most of the other
lands are going to get developed one way or another.
So these public lands that we have now in the east end of the Gorge are very precious,
and that these wildflowers complement the Gorge, and when I find a new species, it just
points up the remarkable nature of this 90-mile sea-level pass through the Cascade Mountains.
This plant only grows in this vicinity of the Gorge.
That's the only place it grows in the world.
Gorge is a pretty remarkable place.
You start all the way from wetland, you have rainforest, and 40 miles farther east, you
got desert.
I mean, just east of the Dalles, there's only 11 inches of rain a year, and just west of
Bonneville, it's 80 inches a year.
So that's quite a contrast.
company have got an extensive farm here.
The fort is so very large that at first arriving, a stranger is almost apt to imagine himself
in the civilized world.
As the fur trade society at Fort Vancouver flourished, the arrival of the Church of England
clergy had a far-reaching impact on the domestic affairs of interracial families.
The post's first clergyman, Herbert Beaver, was totally unsympathetic to fur trade custom
of common law marriages between fur traders and Indian women.
I am determined never to acknowledge such unchristian marriages, and no gentleman of
honor can submit to see his lawful wife associate with these females, nor degrade himself and
her by suffering her to be put on an equality with other men's paramours.
They are not married, but a besotted sensuality attaches her keeper, and this is a beastly
state of fornication that cannot be denied.
The fiery-tempered John McLaughlin, chief factor of Fort Vancouver, was outraged by
this most insulting and unfair assessment.
He himself had married and remained devoted to his mixed-blood wife.
The intrusion of Mr. Beaver's public report of my private affairs is decidedly in bad
taste, and I deeply regret such unhandsome reflections upon my wife, who is deservedly
respected for her numerous charities and many excellent qualities of the heart.
Furthermore, the deprivation of native women from associating in public buildings, the
denial of rations of gratuitous medical attendance, is clearly a most insulting and unfair assessment
of the well-regulated domestic situation at the fort.
Beaver and his wife created such friction that all were gratified when he was relieved
of his post, and the couple departed in 1838.
The Indians of the two lodges we passed today came in their canoes with sundry articles
to sell.
We purchased of them wapatoo roots, salmon trout, and I purchased two beaver skins for
which I gave five small fish hooks.
Encamped under a high hill and with difficulty found a place clear of the tide.
Great joy in camp.
We are in view of the ocean, this great Pacific Ocean which we've been so long anxious to
see.
The day proved showery wet and disagreeable.
We would have spent this day the nativity of Christ and feasting had we anything either
to raise our spirits or even gratify our appetites.
Our dinner consisted of poor elk so much spoiled that we ate it through mere necessity, some
spoiled pounded fish and a few roots.
It rained and blew hard last night, some hard thunder.
Rained last night as usual and the greater part of this day.
This morning proved so rainy that we were undetermined for some time whether we had
best set out.
The rain ceased and it became fair about Meridian at which time we loaded our canoes left Fort
Clatsop on our homeward bound journey.
At this place we had wintered and have lived as well as we had any right to expect.
In the misty crystal glitter of that wild and windward spring, men have fought the pounding
waters and have met a watery grave.
Yes, it tore their boats to splinters but she gave men dreams to dream of the day that
they would conquer that wild and wasted stream.
This area is called the Graveyard of the Pacific, a lot of people think we're all crazy and
I guess maybe to work out here you have to be partially insane.
Steer course one three zero speed ten knots.
You have a pilot ladder on the port side also, is that correct?
Good morning.
It is considered one of the three roughest bars in the world.
The challenge of bringing a ship across the bar is really unmatched I think by any other
port in the United States.
The object of the game is to get on board the pilot ladder which is hanging over to
the side of the ship at the crest of a wave.
Now in certain circumstances it's difficult to judge exactly where the crest is, particularly
when you have a situation where the wind is coming from one direction and the ocean swells
are coming from another, they tend to conflict with each other and it creates for really
hazardous and difficult boarding.
Misjudging it or having just a little bad luck is what has caused accidents in the past
where pilots have broken knees.
It's a little scary.
We generally work about twenty five to thirty foot waves and although it might look like
deep water, the depth of the water is only about fifty five or sixty five feet.
So a ship drawing forty foot of draft only has about fifteen feet of water beneath it
which is about the depth of a swimming pool.
So it's a little shocking when a ship is pitching and rolling under these conditions.
There are hundreds, literally hundreds of shipwrecks over the years.
I would say as far as the loss of life which has occurred on the bar through shipwreck,
the number would be around fifteen hundred.
The Columbia River is absolutely a magnificent piece of water, the history that surrounds
it, the beauty of it, the natural beauty is incredible.
It's spectacular because of the variety.
Really divergent interest.
We do use a lot of electricity but...
Disaster of agriculture was shorted.
Power and flood control.
They needed power.
An aboriginal right for us to fish.
You watch all these barges going...
The salmon is...
Some of the best farm ground in the world... Very excited about getting some land.
Fisheries and wildlife and recreation.
I'd say it's the windsurfing capital.
I got twelve Big Beaver last year.
Every time you come to the Gorge it's an adventure.
Tremendously beautiful part of it.
And we need to protect it for the future generations.
Right again.
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