Celilo Falls

The panel puts paid for in quotation marks and lets the figure stand. The settlement came to about $26.9 million, divided among four treaty nations by population: some $15 million to the Yakama, about $4.6 million to the Umatilla and $4.5 million to Warm Springs, and the rest to the Nez Perce, whose claim the other three disputed. The Yakama council had argued in 1951 that it alone held treaty rights at the falls. The gates of The Dalles Dam closed at ten in the morning on March 10, 1957, and within hours the falls were under water.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Celilo Village — 1.2 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.
• Temani Pesh-wa and She Who Watches — 7.6 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.
• Rowena Crest and the Tom McCall Preserve — 17 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 — 0.9 mi
• Deschutes River Crossing — 2.9 mi
• A Culture Lives On — 6.9 mi
• Sam Hill Country — 7.6 mi