My current work-in-progress is another historical novel set along the Oregon Trail, this one in 1851. A few weeks ago, I submitted a chapter to my critique group in which my characters were traveling down the Columbia River and nearly went over the Cascades Rapids. One of my critique partners asked me why I described the river as so tumultuous—she’d looked up pictures of the Columbia River today, and the pictures she saw made it look like a big, wide lake.
That’s the problem with writing historical fiction. The landscape of today is often quite different than the landscape of the past. Today, if you drive along the highway through the Columbia River Gorge, or if you’re boating on the river itself, you’ll see a wide, calm river flowing quietly between high cliffs. It looks peaceful, wide, and navigable.
But in 1851, it was anything but peaceful.
What we see now hides what was once a significant and dangerous obstacle. Over roughly two miles, the river dropped about forty feet. And the entire flow of the Columbia was forced through a narrow channel choked with rocks and boulders—remnants of the Bonneville Landslide that occurred around 1200 AD. The result was not a gentle current but a relentless series of rapids and falls. Lewis & Clark described this section of the Columbia as
“this great chute of falls is about 1/2 a mile with the water of this great river compressed within the space of 150 paces…great number of both large and small rocks, water passing with great velocity forming & boiling in a horrible manner, with a fall of about 20 feet” (October 30- November 1, 1805).
Forty years later, when overland emigrants reached the Columbia on the final leg of the Oregon Trail, they were generally forced to portage around the cascades. These travelers unloaded all their possessions from the boat or raft they’d taken down the river thus far, then hauled everything along a rough trail around the falls. Then they resumed their river travel on the lower part of the river. It wasn’t a minor inconvenience. It was an exhausting, time-consuming, and sometimes dangerous interruption at the very end of their long journey across prairies and over mountains.
These rapids remained a major obstacle to travel on the Columbia until the 1930s, when the Bonneville Dam was completed. The reservoir behind the dam submerged the rapids entirely. So today’s photographs of the river show a completely altered landscape.
As a native Washingtonian, I grew up knowing that the dams had altered the rivers of the Pacific Northwest. So as I write this novel, I am careful to research the geography my characters would have known—not the dammed Columbia River I knew as a child.
But my critique partner, from a different part of the United States, did not have that perspective. To her, the pictures of today depicted what had always been. So I found her some photographs from before the Bonneville Dam was built, and I’ve included these photographs in this post for other readers.
It’s a good reminder, for me as a writer and for all of us as readers, that the past is not just a different time. It can be a different landscape entirely.
When have you been surprised to learn what a place looked like in the past?
