Northwest Passage: The Great Columbia River.

• Author: Carlough, Leslie A.

Part travelogue, part journalistic treatment, and pan historical review,

Northwest Passage is an entertaining analysis of the history of the Columbia

River. Author William Dietrich has succeeded in constructing a big-picture

study of social development and changing attitudes toward the environment

in general and the Columbia River in particular. Dietrich's work looks at

where our aspirations have led us and defines the context in which the river's

problems have arisen and must be addressed.

1. Introduction

   William Dietrich(1) has written extensively about environmental issues in the Northwest. His first book, Final Forest,(2) received national acclaim as an exhaustive study of perspectives about the endangered Spotted Owl and the logging of ancient Northwest forests. Dietrich considers his new book, Northwest Passage: The Great Columbia River,(3) to be a sequel.(4) In many ways it is. As Dietrich was finishing Final Forest, the National Marine Fisheries Service proposed the listing of some Northwest salmon under the Endangered Species Act.(5) The listing of salmon raised many of the same policy issues and legal questions concerning management of the Columbia River that the listing of the owl had raised concerning management of Northwest forests.

   In Final Forest, Dietrich discussed our failure to manage ancient forests in a manner that prevents their incremental loss over time. We are also failing to prevent the loss of salmon. Neither of these failures is intentional; each is largely the result of our inertia to change and our indifference to the loss. Dietrich says Northwest Passage is not intended to define how his readers should think and feel about the river; he claims he merely wants them to think and feel something, to prod them from indifference.(6) It is difficult to believe Dietrich is being quite genuine in this claim. The taming of the Columbia's cataracts and the damage we have caused to the river's ecology cannot help but kindle remorse for our loss of The Wild. Yet, this is not a book designed to persuade us into directed action, but to help us understand where our aspirations and history have led us.

2. Summary

   1. Natural Beginnings

      The book progresses approximately chronologically. Dietrich explains the Columbia's geology with particular emphasis on crashing continental plates, sprinting glaciers, and chronic floods from ancient Lake Missoula. Twice each century until about 12,800 years ago, the impoundments around Lake Missoula failed, releasing 500-cubic miles of water in torrential pulses that scoured and sculpted the Columbia basin and the Northwest region.(7) These processes occurred so rapidly, in geological terms, that they created the steep gradients and cliffs that form the spectacular rapids and views for which the Columbia has become famous.(8)

   2. Finding the Ouragan(9)

      The book then moves on to exploration and conquest of the region by white Euro-American explorers. Dietrich notes that while aboriginal Americans had lived along the river at least eleven millennia before its discovery by whites, the present condition of the river is essentially the consequence of its development by whites during the last two hundred years.(10)

      Euro-americans needed a western river to complete their transcontinental waterway, and thus invented such a river in their minds long before having any evidence that the Columbia existed.(11) Despite several decades of searching, the Columbia avoided discovery because its explorers had difficulties traversing its basins and tracking its tributaries. Furthermore, the river was hidden from ocean-going explorers because its now infamous bar(12) concealed the Columbia's mouth.

      In 1792, an adventurous Captain Gray successfully navigated the dangerous bar and entered the river with his ship the Columbia Rediviva, future namesake of the river. It would be over a decade before Meriwether Lewis and William Clark discovered that no transcontinental waterway existed and several years after that before cartographers would understand the Columbia's twisted course. During these years, while the United States, Spain, Britain, and France vied for superiority over the region, entrepreneurial seafarers traded copper and nails to Indians for pelts and salmon, and then traded the pelts in Asia. But times were not all happy, a,nd encounters between the Indians and whites did not always end well. The Indian cultures quickly declined in the face of European disease and weaponry, but the fate of both cultures became intricately entwined. Dietrich notes that while we have been conditioned to look for heroes and villains, the relationship between the whites and the many different Indian cultures was an enormously complex story of mutual dependence and exploitation, shifting strategies, chronic misunderstandings, bitter ruthlessness and generous aid by all sides."(13)

   3. Settling the Area

      As the dribble of settlers along the Oregon Trail became a flood during the mid-1840s, conflict between whites and Indians grew. The peoples did not understand one another. When whites mined an area out, allowed their cattle and sheep to overgraze it, or otherwise exhausted its resources, they moved on. The tribes had inhabited the same area for as long as their oral tradition could remember and had no inclination to move or be pushed aside.(14)

      The first wheeled wagon to traverse the Oregon Trail was that of Presbyterian minister Marcus Whitman and his new bride Narcissa.(15) Although the Whitmans failed to convert many Indians to their stem Christian mythology during their eleven-year mission, they were instrumental in promoting white settlement of the area.(16) Whitman...