Columbia River Creation
There was a beginning of the Columbia, just as there is a beginning of all things. In one tradition, the beginning is told in myth. In another tradition, the story is one of geology. The mythic could be said to inform the geologic. They are not so different.
According to a Yakama legend, the mythical Columbia began, as does the creation story in Genesis, with water. In Genesis, the Earth was formless and empty, and the Spirit of God, the creative force of the Universe, hovered over the water. In the Yakama legend, the hovering spirit, Whee-me-me-ow-ah, the Great Chief Above the Water, reached down from the sky where he lived and scooped handfuls of mud from the shallow places and made the land. Some of the mud he piled high to make mountains, and some of it he made into rocks. He made trees and roots and berries grow on the land, and he made man from a ball of mud. He gave the man instructions about hunting and fishing, and when the man became lonely the Great Chief Above made woman and taught her how to gather and prepare berries, and cook the salmon and game the man brought to her. He blew his breath upon her and made her skilled in these things so that she could teach her daughters and granddaughters.
Coteeakun, an associate of Smohalla, the great Yakama prophet, told this version of the creation to Major J.W. MacMurray of the U.S. Army when he was stationed among the Yakama in 1884-85, according to author Ella Clark. It may be an accurate retelling of a story handed down through generations, or with its distinctly Biblical tone it may be influenced by the work of Christian missionaries of the time. Other Northwest tribes have similar oral traditions about the creation of the world, usually involving a benevolent Chief Above and the creation of distinct levels — underworld, earth and sky — linked through the middle in some way, as by a pole, a tree or a waterfall. Humans also were divinely created by the Chief Above or, in some traditions, by his agent Coyote.
The Columbia itself was the work of Coyote in most oral traditions. Realizing that salmon were in the ocean and that people in the interior needed food, Coyote fought a battle with the giant beaver god Wishpoosh, backing him through the Cascade Mountains to the ocean and then killing him. It was the back-and-forth slashing action of the great beaver’s tale that scraped out the Columbia River Gorge and opened the channel to the sea. This made salmon available to the people. Coyote cut the beaver to pieces and distributed the pieces on the land, and they became humans. Later, Coyote tricked the five swallow sisters, who had built a dam across the river to block salmon, into leaving him alone there. While the sisters were away, he destroyed the dam, again freeing the way for salmon. The rocks of Celilo Falls were the remnants of the dam.
Thus we have the Columbia River and salmon. There are other legends about the origin of the river and its people, legends that also coincide with the geology and ecology of the river as we know it today. There were cataclysms of volcanism, floods and earthquakes. The first humans to live what is now the Northwest migrated here between 12,000 and 30,000 years ago in two waves, one from Asia around the northern rim of the Pacific Ocean and another from northern Europe, to settle along the Columbia, and places farther south.
Much, much earlier, the ancient Columbia, as it existed some 40 million years ago, was a lot different from the river we know today. The ancient river formed around what are known as ancestral mountains in what is now eastern Washington and Oregon that predated the Cascade Range; the river drained to shallow seas in a great embayment that stretched from what is now the south-central Oregon Coast north to what is now Puget Sound and the Olympic peninsula.
In the area between what is now eastern Washington and Oregon and the ocean, repeated volcanism over millennia formed the river channel, pushing it steadily north until it reached its present location. The geologic history of the modern Columbia River Gorge through the Cascades could be said to have its origin in the Yakima Basalt of the Columbia River Basalt Group, the greatest outpouring of lava in the history of North America. The lava spread across western Idaho and eastern Washington and Oregon and flowed to the Pacific Ocean for some 4 million years between 11.2 and 16.6 million years ago. The repeated basalt flows formed the area we know today as the Columbia Plateau of central Washington and Oregon.
The sheer weight of some 90,000 cubic miles of basalt, layered in more than 200 separate flows, gradually depressed the Earth’s crust and shaped the Columbia Basin, sloping inward from perimeter elevations of 2,000 to 4,000 feet above sea level to less than 500 feet in the Pasco Basin of south central Washington. Beginning about 12 million years ago, the pressure began to warp the basin into the characteristic east-west folds that are the modern-day tributary river basins. It is something of an irony that the rich farmland of the Columbia Plateau, known as the Palouse Formation, resulted from extremely arid conditions between the advance and retreat of glaciers during the last Ice Age. During the interglacial warm periods, winds deposited glacial dust and silt up to 150 feet deep in some places.
Geology and mythology need not be mutually exclusive. Neither tradition needs to be more right than the other. What is important is the river had a beginning, and that in the beginning, before everything else, there was water.
Learn More - Columbia River: Description, Creation, and Discovery
There was a beginning of the Columbia, just as there is a beginning of all things. In one tradition, the beginning is told in myth. In another tradition, the story is one of geology. The mythic could be said to inform the geologic. They are not so different.
According to a Yakama legend, the mythical Columbia began, as does the creation story in Genesis, with water. In Genesis, the Earth was formless and empty, and the Spirit of God, the creative force of the Universe, hovered over the water. In the Yakama legend, the hovering spirit, Whee-me-me-ow-ah, the Great Chief Above the Water, reached down from the sky where he lived and scooped handfuls of mud from the shallow places and made the land. Some of the mud he piled high to make mountains, and some of it he made into rocks. He made trees and roots and berries grow on the land, and he made man from a ball of mud. He gave the man instructions about hunting and fishing, and when the man became lonely the Great Chief Above made woman and taught her how to gather and prepare berries, and cook the salmon and game the man brought to her. He blew his breath upon her and made her skilled in these things so that she could teach her daughters and granddaughters.
Coteeakun, an associate of Smohalla, the great Yakama prophet, told this version of the creation to Major J.W. MacMurray of the U.S. Army when he was stationed among the Yakama in 1884-85, according to author Ella Clark. It may be an accurate retelling of a story handed down through generations, or with its distinctly Biblical tone it may be influenced by the work of Christian missionaries of the time. Other Northwest tribes have similar oral traditions about the creation of the world, usually involving a benevolent Chief Above and the creation of distinct levels — underworld, earth and sky — linked through the middle in some way, as by a pole, a tree or a waterfall. Humans also were divinely created by the Chief Above or, in some traditions, by his agent Coyote.
The Columbia itself was the work of Coyote in most oral traditions. Realizing that salmon were in the ocean and that people in the interior needed food, Coyote fought a battle with the giant beaver god Wishpoosh, backing him through the Cascade Mountains to the ocean and then killing him. It was the back-and-forth slashing action of the great beaver’s tale that scraped out the Columbia River Gorge and opened the channel to the sea. This made salmon available to the people. Coyote cut the beaver to pieces and distributed the pieces on the land, and they became humans. Later, Coyote tricked the five swallow sisters, who had built a dam across the river to block salmon, into leaving him alone there. While the sisters were away, he destroyed the dam, again freeing the way for salmon. The rocks of Celilo Falls were the remnants of the dam.
Thus we have the Columbia River and salmon. There are other legends about the origin of the river and its people, legends that also coincide with the geology and ecology of the river as we know it today. There were cataclysms of volcanism, floods and earthquakes. The first humans to live what is now the Northwest migrated here between 12,000 and 30,000 years ago in two waves, one from Asia around the northern rim of the Pacific Ocean and another from northern Europe, to settle along the Columbia, and places farther south.
Much, much earlier, the ancient Columbia, as it existed some 40 million years ago, was a lot different from the river we know today. The ancient river formed around what are known as ancestral mountains in what is now eastern Washington and Oregon that predated the Cascade Range; the river drained to shallow seas in a great embayment that stretched from what is now the south-central Oregon Coast north to what is now Puget Sound and the Olympic peninsula.
In the area between what is now eastern Washington and Oregon and the ocean, repeated volcanism over millennia formed the river channel, pushing it steadily north until it reached its present location. The geologic history of the modern Columbia River Gorge through the Cascades could be said to have its origin in the Yakima Basalt of the Columbia River Basalt Group, the greatest outpouring of lava in the history of North America. The lava spread across western Idaho and eastern Washington and Oregon and flowed to the Pacific Ocean for some 4 million years between 11.2 and 16.6 million years ago. The repeated basalt flows formed the area we know today as the Columbia Plateau of central Washington and Oregon.
The sheer weight of some 90,000 cubic miles of basalt, layered in more than 200 separate flows, gradually depressed the Earth’s crust and shaped the Columbia Basin, sloping inward from perimeter elevations of 2,000 to 4,000 feet above sea level to less than 500 feet in the Pasco Basin of south central Washington. Beginning about 12 million years ago, the pressure began to warp the basin into the characteristic east-west folds that are the modern-day tributary river basins. It is something of an irony that the rich farmland of the Columbia Plateau, known as the Palouse Formation, resulted from extremely arid conditions between the advance and retreat of glaciers during the last Ice Age. During the interglacial warm periods, winds deposited glacial dust and silt up to 150 feet deep in some places.
Geology and mythology need not be mutually exclusive. Neither tradition needs to be more right than the other. What is important is the river had a beginning, and that in the beginning, before everything else, there was water.
Learn More - Columbia River: Description, Creation, and Discovery
