When the River Ran Wild! Indian Traditions on the Mid-Columbia and the Warm Springs Reservation.

• Position: Book Review

George W. Aguilar Sr. 1200 SW Park Avenue, Portland, OR 97205-2483: Oregon Historical Society Press, June 2005. (503) 306-5233. http://www.ohs.org. ISBN 0-295-98484-8. 272 pp. $22.50 Paperback.

When the River Ran Wild! is Aguilar's recounting of events he heard while watching his grandmother make moccasins by the light of a coal-oil lamp and while strapped to the back of his aunt's horse on the way to the huckleberry grounds. He learned of these events at Coyote's Fishing Place, where his uncles built scaffolds and taught him how to use traditional technologies to catch salmon as they made their seasonal runs up the river. In this remarkable personal memoir and tribal history, we learn about Aguilar's people, the Kiksht-speaking Eastern Chinookans, whose way of life connected to the rhythms and resources of the great fishing grounds of the Columbia River at Five Mile Rapids.

When the RiverRan Wild!is the story of a culture and a community that has undergone tremendous change since 1805, when the River People encountered Meriwether Lewis and William Clark as the explorers traveled down the Columbia River on their way to the Pacific Ocean. To find the stories of that change, Aguilar draws on the journals and diaries of early white missionaries and settlers, such as Gabriel Franchere, Reverend Henry Perkins of Wascopum Mission, and A. B. Meacham. He found other stories in anthropological papers and historical studies that recorded the voices of people who practiced and remembered...