An honor guard of the 1st Oregon Volunteer Company from Civil War days greeted us with a morning flag raising at their encampment by The Columbia Gorge Discovery Center in The Dalles. Appropriately, their reenactment was in a field of wild flowers called Oregon Sunshine. The Dalles remains a crossroads of history on the River of the West.
The Corps of Discovery also encamped here in a natural defensive position they called “Rock Fort,” one of the only recognizable campsites remaining from that nation building journey 200 years ago.
Capt. Wm. Clark recorded 10,000 native people gathered here to fish for salmon and to trade alongside the narrow chutes and rapids of the Columbia River, including Celilo Falls. Clark detailed in the journal how the Indians dipped salmon with fiber nets on long-handled poles, split and sun and wind-dried their catch on racks and packed it in woven baskets. They used dried salmon skins for the outer wrapping.
Shortly after, French Canadian voyageurs in the fur brigades arrived and named this The Dalles, a place where water runs quickly through stone gutters.
The first white settlement followed when Rev. Daniel Lee started a Methodist Mission. In 1843 the first Oregon Trail wagon train reached The Dalles after a 2,000-mile trek.
West of The Dalles the Columbia River sliced through the Cascade Mountains and left no room for wagon passage. So, the pioneers built rafts, took the wheels off their covered wagons and placed wagons, families and possessions on the rafts while their sons drove the livestock along a gorge trail. The current carried the pioneers toward their “Promised Land,” The Willamette Valley, and to disaster in rapids at The Cascades. Pioneers who followed learned of the river hardships and cut the Barlow Wagon Trail from The Dalles around Mt. Hood to Oregon City which then became the end of The Oregon Trail.
John C. Fremont and Kit Carson also arrived here in the year 1843 to begin the exploration of the Great Basin country to the south where they discovered The Great Salt Lake.
Sea Lion guests relived this saga with an introduction at The Discovery Center, a bus ride over the Roweena Plateau portion of the original Scenic Columbia River Highway and by bicycling or hiking a non-motorized portion.
We rejoined Sea Lion in Hood River for the day’s end cruise through Bonneville Dam ship locks and then past Horsetail, Ponytail, Multnomah, Wahkeena, Mist and Triple falls which spill from hanging valleys into the Columbia River Gorge.
