A Culture Lives On

The panel's subtitle is A Culture Lives On, and the people nearest this overlook were the Wishram, whose main village downriver was Nixlúidix. Wishram is their Sahaptin neighbors' name for them, from Wɨ́šx̣am, spearfish. Lewis and Clark wrote down Echeloot, which linguists now read as a word for a resident of Nixlúidix, since people named themselves by village. In 1905 the linguist Edward Sapir took down Wishram stories from Louis Simpson and published them in 1909 as Wishram Texts. The later village at the site, Spearfish, was flooded behind The Dalles Dam in 1957.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Temani Pesh-wa and She Who Watches — 0.7 mi
  Rock images cut from a canyon wall weeks before The Dalles Dam drowned it, kept in storage for half a century, and brought back to the river by the treaty tribes.
• Celilo Village — 6.5 mi
  The village that stayed on the bluff above the drowned falls, rebuilt half a century late by the government that flooded them, where the salmon season still opens each April.
• Rowena Crest and the Tom McCall Preserve — 10.0 mi
  A crest where the Ice Age floods jammed against a basalt promontory, above a plateau of mounds no one has fully explained, and a few in the parking loop that the highway department built.

More markers nearby

• Ancient Indian Fishing Grounds — 6.7 mi
• Celilo Falls — 6.9 mi
• Deschutes River Crossing — 9.1 mi
• Klickitat River Bridge — 12 mi