Columbia Hills Historical State Park History

The story of Columbia Hills Historical State Park is both exciting and painful in its connections to one of the most significant centers of human and natural history in the Pacific Northwest. The park lies just a short distance upstream from the site of the Long Narrows of the Columbia River and about 10 miles downstream from the site of Celilo Falls. Both features were inundated by the reservoir behind The Dalles Dam in 1957. Indigenous people have lived here for millennia, thriving at what was one of the most productive fishing sites in North America, surrounded by rich upland resources and the focal point of an extensive trade network.

Flood Basalt and Ice Age Floods

The bedrock landscape of Columbia Hills Historical State Park was formed by the eruption of the Columbia Plateau flood basalts. The basalt lava erupted from fissures in today’s southeastern Washington, produced by an upwelling of molten magma from deep in the Earth’s interior. Numerous lava flows spread out over much of the eastern parts of today’s Washington and Oregon. Some flowed down along the course of the ancient Columbia River. The flows hardened into the basalt columns that form the cliffs soaring above the river in today’s park. Soils buried between flows were oxidized by the heat of the overlying flow to form deposits of red ochre. As the Cascade Mountains bulged upward, the river carved its course down through the lava flows, creating the Columbia River Gorge.

Spires and buttes such as Horsethief Butte were later eroded by a series of glacial lake outburst floods that blasted across the Columbia Basin near the end of the last ice age. The floods were released when huge ice-dammed lakes broke through the ice, scouring away accumulated soils and fractured rocks, leaving the stark rock walls of the Columbia Plateau and Columbia River Gorge.

Indigenous Lands

Columbia Hills Historical State Park lies within the traditional territories of Chinookan and Sahaptian Indigenous people whose present-day descendants include members of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation and Nez Perce Tribe.

Importantly, the area encompassing the falls and rapids of the Columbia, known as Wyam (“sound of water upon the rocks,” in some Indigenous languages) was a meeting point occupied both by Coast Salish people and Sahaptian people of the interior. Each group had their own language and customs, yet developed a mutually advantageous coexistence with respectful understanding of who could fish where and when.

Traditionally, some of the Indigenous people of the region left winter residences along the Columbia River and its tributaries in the spring to travel to surrounding areas to collect, hunt, fish and trade on seasonal rounds. The rivers have long served as the primary transportation corridors in the region as well as the source of salmon, a mainstay of Indigenous food and culture. Celilo Falls and the Short and Long Narrows of the Columbia River were at the heart of the economic and cultural hub of Indigenous life in the region.

Columbia Hills Rock Images

Not surprisingly, given the dense population of the area for millennia, Columbia Hills Historical State Park and the surrounding area contain some of the most significant Indigenous rock images in Washington. The images consists of both pictographs (painted on rock surfaces) and petroglyphs (pecked or scratched onto rock). There is a mixture of coastal and interior artistic styles, reflecting the diversity of cultures in the area.

Image motifs include stick figure humans, bighorn sheep, owls and other birds, lizards, stars, concentric circles, and many more.

Pictographs are primarily painted with pigments derived from the red ochre created by the oxidation of soils by basalt lava flows. The Tsagaglalal (“She Who Watches”) petroglyph, one of the most elaborate rock art motifs now protected at Columbia Hills Historical State Park, was pecked through a red ochre wash applied to the rock surface, combining both techniques.

Lewis and Clark

The Corps of Discovery led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark passed by the site of today’s Columbia Hills Historical State Park on October 25, 1805, as they approached the difficult passage through the Long Narrows of the Columbia River. Clark wrote, “Capt Lewis and my Self walked down to See the place the Indians pointed out as the worst place in passing through the gut, which we found difficuelt of passing without great danger … we Concluded to Make a portage of our most valuable articles and run the canoes thro.”

Under the guidance of Private Pierre Cruzatte, the most experienced boatman of the Corps, the explorers managed to navigate their five canoes through the narrows with only two of them taking on water.

On their return upriver during greater river flow in April 1806, the travelers decided to portage all of their canoes and gear around the narrows for safety.

Lewis and Clark observed a large village, Wishram, located just above the start of the Long Narrows. The village was situated on a rise, Wakemap Mound, more than 30-feet-high created by the accumulation of material built up through thousands of years of occupation of the site.

William Clark noted in his journal that he was invited into one man’s home in the village. He recorded that it was “large and commodious,” and the first Indigenous house built of wood that they had seen since leaving the forested areas of the eastern United States.

Lewis and Clark estimated that between 7,000 and 10,000 people lived along the stretch of the Columbia River between Celilo Falls and Beacon Rock, by far the densest population they encountered on their journey of thousands of miles.

Treaties and Land Distribution

Local tribes ceded ownership of the area to the US federal government under duress in the Yakima, Walla Walla and Nez Perce Treaties of Camp Stevens and the Middle Oregon Treaty in 1855, keeping rights to harvest natural resources in their usual and accustomed places including the falls and rapids of the Columbia River.

Government surveys were completed in 1861 and some of the land in today’s Columbia Hills Historical State Park passed into private ownership under terms of various federal land disposal laws.

Homestead Ranches

Settlers claiming and purchasing land in the area recognized that the 160-acre limitation in the Homestead Act did not provide enough land for successful farming in the arid land of the Columbia Hills.

Private ownership of land in today’s Columbia Hills Historical State Park started with a Cash Entry patent, a type of sale of public domain lands, issued to William Murphy in 1866. Peter Nelson and William Taylor purchased Cash Entry patents in 1869, in the area known as Colowesh Bottom, named for an Indigenous family that lived there, and upstream along the Columbia River. Cash Entry patents had no limit on acreage but were only available to buyers with sufficient capital to make the purchase directly from the government land office.

Later colonizers located claims centered on freshwater springs found higher on the slopes above the river at the contacts between basalt lava flows, where groundwater is forced to the surface by impermeable rock below. These claims included Homestead Entry patents which required construction of a house and establishment of a farming enterprise. Some combined their homestead claim with Timber Culture patents, which required the claimant to plant 40 acres of trees (later amended to 10 acres with 675 living trees) in order to obtain an additional 160 acres of land. Other homesteaders increased their land holdings with Cash Entry patents if they were able to save enough money to afford a purchase.

The Lucas, Crawford and Brune families established ranching operations on land in today’s Columbia Hills Historical State Park using these land distribution laws but found it difficult to make a success of their operations with the land base they had acquired. The Crawford and Lucas families were joined by marriage in 1898, and the next generation of Crawfords consolidated the grazing land and shifted from sheep grazing to generalized agriculture.

In 1935, bankruptcy forced the sale of almost all of the ranch lands to Dr. John Reuter for payment of debts. After his death, his son John Reuter Jr. managed the ranch until bankruptcy forced a foreclosure. Pat and Darlene Bleakney purchased the expanded Dalles Mountain Ranch in 1975.

The Dalles Dam

After World War II, the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) proposed the construction of The Dalles Dam on the Columbia River just downstream from today’s Columbia Hills Historical State Park. Tribes opposed the dam on the grounds that it would violate treaty rights by inundating usual and accustomed fishing sites including Celilo Falls and the Narrows. The USACE and its supporters advocated for construction by raising Cold War fears about national security, saying “substantial amounts of additional power are needed to meet the increasing requirements of defense industries… at the lowest possible cost.”

Other opposition came from people who felt that breaking the treaties would harm the reputation of the United States as a leader in the Cold War contest between democracy and authoritarianism. In 1951, the US House of Representatives blocked funding of The Dalles Dam until the USACE negotiated a financial settlement with the treaty tribes. Individual settlements were reached with each of the four represented tribes, totaling over $36 million, or slightly more than $3,000 per tribal member.

In 1952, the USACE began construction of the dam. The project created a 200-foot-high dam with 22 electricity generation turbines, locks to allow vessel navigation and fish ladders for salmon passage. The damming of the river at that point resulted in many impacts to the regional landscape.

Despite fish ladders and other systems to help anadromous fish pass The Dalles Dam and others on the river, salmon and steelhead runs on the Columbia River declined from 10-16 million returning fish annually to less than 1 million.

The reservoir behind the dam flooded the site of the Wishram village and Colowesh Bottom, creating Horsethief Lake. The lake is connected to the rest of the reservoir by a culvert under the relocated railway’s causeway.

The reservoir would also flood thousands of Indigenous rock image sites. In April 1956, US Senator Wayne Morse, of Oregon, secured a congressional appropriation of $8,500 to remove rock image panels from the area to be flooded by The Dalles Dam.

Most of the panels were removed from three locations in Petroglyph Canyon, below Horsethief Butte, in February 1957, just weeks before the areas were inundated by waters rising behind The Dalles Dam. From 1957 to 2003, they were stored at various locations near The Dalles Dam. In 2003, a cooperative project by treaty tribes, the US Army Corps of Engineers and the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission moved the rock image pieces to a display area in Columbia Hills Historical State Park and created the Temani Pesh-wa Trail for visitors to view the preserved panels.

Other rock image sites within the park can only be visited with scheduled tours led by park staff, to protect these fragile and sacred sites.

Silencing Celilo Falls

By far the largest impact of The Dalles Dam was the inundation of Celilo Falls and the Narrows of the Columbia River.

At the dedication of The Dalles Dam on October 10, 1959, Vice President Richard M. Nixon extolled the “biggest dam ever built by the Corps of Engineers,” while others recalled watching the rising waters inundate Celilo Falls two years earlier:

"As the little islands disappeared, I could see my grandmother trembling, like something was hitting her … she just put out her hand and she started to cry."

The pain of that moment persists. Quoted by author Katrine Barber, tribal elder Lana Jack has said that “it seemed unfathomable that something like this could happen, that Celilo Falls could disappear, and that we could be made as a people to perish.”

Creating a State Park

In 1960, the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission (WSPRC) reviewed recreation development plans prepared by the USACE for an area that had never passed out of the public domain near the flooded Colowesh Bottom. In 1964, the WSPRC entered into a lease to manage the property for water-oriented recreation including swimming, boating and fishing.

In 1970, the WSPRC officially named the park Horsethief Lake State Park, using the name for the flooded Colowesh Bottom purportedly bestowed by powerline surveyors Henry Stegman and Emmet Clouse because “it looked so much like a setting for a wild western with horsethieves.”

After 18 years managing the Dalles Mountain Ranch, the Bleakneys sought to create a legacy of resource preservation and land stewardship by transferring the land to public agencies. The non-profit Trust for Public Land brokered a sale of the land in two parcels. The highest elevation lands became the Columbia Hills Natural Area Preserve managed by the Washington Department of Natural Resources. The remaining lands, including the ranch buildings, were transferred to the WSPRC in October 1993.

In 2003, the WSPRC combined the property with Horsethief Lake State Park to create Columbia Hills Historical State Park.