Bonneville Dam

Before 1938 the Columbia ran through the Cascade Rapids a few miles above here, the white water that stopped canoes and steamboats, forced Oregon Trail emigrants into a portage, and had been fished and traded around by Chinookan villages for a very long time. Bonneville Dam, built by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1930s, the first federal lock and dam on the river, put the rapids under its reservoir, and with them some thirty-seven tribal fishing sites by the government's own later count.

The dam was built with fish ladders, long staircases of pools that let salmon and steelhead climb past it, and the Bradford Island visitor center on the Oregon side puts you below the waterline beside one. Through the windows chinook, sockeye, coho, steelhead, shad and lamprey work upstream, and nearby a counter logs every fish by species, as someone has each year since the ladders opened. Those counts are much of how the Northwest knows what has become of its salmon. Downstream, the Bonneville Fish Hatchery keeps white sturgeon in a viewing pond, the largest of them, Herman, more than ten feet long.

The island has another history. From 1942 to 1982 the Corps used its east end as a landfill and dumped electrical equipment into the river off its northeast corner, some of it loaded with PCBs, which build up in fish. Fish caught near the island have carried some of the highest PCB levels measured in the country, and health authorities warn against eating resident fish from this stretch. After petitions from the Yakama Nation and the Oregon and Washington environmental agencies, the EPA listed Bradford Island as a Superfund site on March 17, 2022.