![]() ![]() ![]() Their descendants now live on the Yakama, Umatilla and Warm Springs reservations. Between Celilo Falls upriver to Priest Rapids, there was a collection of peoples, not a single tribe so much as myriad autonomous groups, speaking the Sahaptin language. These comprised many different cultures, speaking different languages (indeed, the native languages of North America are greater in number and more diverse than the languages of any other continent). Much better documented are the people who later witnessed the arrival of the Lewis & Clark expedition. ![]() But just who they were, how they came to be here and what became of them is lost to prehistory. The last glacial flood came through about 12,800 years ago, so the buried hearth proves people have been here at least that long. Tantalizing glimpses of early habitation - an ancient hearth, for instance - were discovered during construction of The Dalles Dam, and farther upstream near the mouth of the John Day River, buried under gravel deposits laid down by those floods. Most archaeological evidence along the river dates no further than the end of the latest Ice Age, but "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." The ice age concluded with dramatic floods that would have swept away any earlier traces. There's no good record of precisely which peoples first came to live in the Columbia River Gorge. ![]()
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