The Petroglyphs of Temani Pesh-wa: A History Written in Stone

 

 

For at least ten thousand years, the stretch of the Columbia River near what is today Columbia Hills State Park was one of the most important gathering places in all of North America. Archaeological evidence — fish bones recovered from the area and carbon dated to roughly ten millennia ago — establishes human presence here reaching back to the very edge of the post-Ice Age era. The people who lived and gathered here were primarily the Wasco and Wishram, Upper Chinookan speaking peoples who maintained permanent villages on the Oregon and Washington banks respectively, living year-round at the river’s edge. Seasonally they were joined by the Yakama, the Warm Springs, the Umatilla, the Nez Perce, and peoples from as far away as the Great Plains and British Columbia, drawn by the extraordinary abundance of the river at this location.

What drew them was Celilo Falls and the Long Narrows of the Columbia — a place where the river constricted dramatically, dropping over forty foot basalt cliffs in a horseshoe shaped cataract of tremendous power and noise, audible from ten miles away. At certain points the river squeezed through channels as narrow as forty feet across. This violent geography, so dangerous to boats and travelers, was a gift to fishermen. The churning water concentrated returning salmon in predictable corridors, making them vulnerable to the long handled dipnets that fishermen wielded from wooden platforms cantilevered out over the rapids. It has been estimated that before commercial fishing began, between six million and ten million salmon returned annually to spawn in the Columbia and its tributaries. Celilo was among the richest harvest points on the entire river system.

But this location was far more than a fishing site. For thousands of years it functioned as one of the great marketplaces of the continent. As many as five thousand people would gather here at the height of the trading season, exchanging salmon, dried goods, shells, obsidian, buffalo hides, and manufactured goods across a network that stretched from the Pacific Coast deep into the interior. It was a place of ceremony, of diplomacy, of marriage alliances between distant peoples, of spiritual practice. The canyon walls and rock faces surrounding the fishing grounds bore witness to all of it, and it was onto those surfaces that generation after generation of people pressed their most private and most communal expressions, carving and painting images into the basalt that would outlast their world by millennia.

The images were made using two distinct techniques, sometimes separately and sometimes in combination. Petroglyphs were created by pecking directly into the dark basalt surface using a harder stone tool, removing the weathered outer layer to reveal the lighter rock beneath, creating images through the contrast of fresh and aged stone. Pictographs were painted onto the rock surface using pigments, most commonly red ochre, a iron rich mineral that produced a distinctive reddish tone that has proven remarkably durable across centuries of weather and sun. The most celebrated image at Columbia Hills, Tsagaglalal — She Who Watches — combined both techniques, pecked through a red ochre wash that had been applied to the rock face first, creating an image of exceptional visual power. The subject matter ranged widely. Owls, elk, bighorn sheep, eagles, human figures, abstract geometric designs, and creatures that defy easy categorization appear throughout the panels. Many images are believed to have emerged from vision quest ceremonies — deeply personal spiritual experiences in which the individual who made the image may have been the only person who fully understood its meaning. Some images were almost certainly communal and instructional. The water monster figure, depicted on one of the surviving panels, appears in photographs of the Celilo fishing sites carved directly into rocks at the water’s edge, and is widely interpreted as a cautionary image, a warning to fishermen about the lethal power of the currents they worked above every day. The same rock faces were used repeatedly across generations, so that ancient images and relatively newer ones sometimes appear side by side, separated by centuries or millennia but occupying the same surface.

The construction of The Dalles Dam ended all of it. The Army Corps of Engineers began work on the dam in 1952, and from the moment the project was authorized it was clear that the reservoir behind it would inundate Celilo Falls, the Long Narrows, the ancient village sites, and the canyon walls covered in rock art — collectively representing one of the most significant concentrations of human cultural material anywhere in the Pacific Northwest. The tribes opposed the dam fiercely and futilely. In 1947, Congressional hearings concluded that the dam would not violate tribal fishing rights under the 1855 Treaties, and the government ultimately paid the affected tribes a monetary settlement — approximately thirty eight hundred dollars per enrolled member — for the loss of their fishing sites, while technically leaving their fishing rights intact. The tribes did not share in the celebration when the dam was dedicated.

The effort to salvage what could be saved before the waters rose was part of a nationwide program called the River Basin Surveys, established by the Smithsonian Institution in 1945 specifically in response to the massive wave of postwar dam construction that was methodically flooding archaeological sites across the American West. The program was chronically underfunded and perpetually overwhelmed by the scale of what it was trying to preserve against hard deadlines set by the construction schedules of the Army Corps of Engineers. At the Dalles, serious professional excavation did take place. Archaeologist Luther Cressman of the University of Oregon led excavations at sites near Celilo in the early 1950s, recovering stone scrapers, projectile points, net sinkers, and an extraordinary 125,000 pieces of salmon vertebrae — physical evidence of ten thousand years of continuous occupation and use. As for the petroglyph panels themselves, the method of their removal tells you something about the conditions under which the work was done. The panels were cut from the canyon walls using jackhammers — not a tool associated with careful preservation, but the tool of a workforce racing against a fixed and immovable deadline. Blasting was occurring in the vicinity throughout the construction period. A 1956 memo preserved in Army Corps records documents a Celilo Village resident complaining that nearby blasting had broken windows and put a hole in a roof. One documented blast during dam construction used more than twenty tons of powder and removed sixty thousand cubic yards of basalt. What was officially salvaged represented a small fraction of what existed. The vast majority of the rock art remained in place on the canyon walls when the gates closed.

On March 10, 1957, the floodgates of The Dalles Dam were shut at ten in the morning. Within four and a half hours, Celilo Falls — the oldest continuously inhabited site in North America, a place of gathering and ceremony and commerce for ten thousand years — was underwater. Tribal members stood on the banks and watched it happen, some singing traditional songs as the water rose over the cliffs. The roar that had been audible for ten miles went silent in an afternoon.

The salvaged petroglyph panels spent the next forty six years in storage at various locations near The Dalles Dam, largely inaccessible to the public and removed from any meaningful context. Then, in 2003, a collaborative project brought them back into the light. Working together, treaty tribes, the United States Army Corps of Engineers, and the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission undertook the careful relocation of the rock image pieces to a specially prepared display area within Columbia Hills Historical State Park, a few miles upstream from where the dam now stands. The following year, in 2004, the Temani Pesh-wa Trail opened to visitors. The name translates from the Sahaptin language as Written on Rock. The trail features forty two large relocated petroglyph panels along with approximately one hundred other images, displayed along a paved walkway behind a protective wooden fence. Interpretive signs accompany each panel, providing photographs of the original carvings in their canyon context and describing their original locations before the inundation. The Horsethief Lake section of the park, which encompasses the trail, is recognized as a National Historic Site. The display is open to self-guided visitors during daylight hours from April through October each year.

What survives at Temani Pesh-wa is fragmentary and rescued under difficult circumstances, cut from canyon walls with jackhammers weeks before the water rose. But it is also remarkable — a tangible connection to ten thousand years of human presence on one of the great rivers of the continent, and to a world that was deliberately and permanently erased within living memory.