The Dalles

The Great Mart and Wascopam Mission

The Dalles is the county seat and, by the Oregon Encyclopedia’s count, the largest city in Wasco County, on a bend of the Columbia River at the foot of what were once a series of dangerous rapids.¹ For more than ten thousand years Native people gathered on the banks here to fish and trade, and the Wasq’ó-pam (Wasco), the People of the Horn-bowl, lived in the area; their descendants are now members of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs.¹ In October 1805 the Corps of Discovery camped at the mouth of Que-Nett Creek, today called Mill Creek, at the gathering place Lewis and Clark called the “Great Mart of all this Country.”^1,4 Fur traders used the word dalles for places where a river runs through narrow, rocky channels, and French Canadian traders of the Hudson’s Bay Company called these rapids Les Grandes Dalles de la Columbia.¹ In 1940 the state guide Oregon: End of the Trail glossed the name as French for flagstones and counted 5,885 people in the town.⁵ American missionaries Daniel Lee and Henry Perkins established Wascopam Mission on March 21, 1838, and by 1841 it was a stop for emigrants at the end of the overland Oregon Trail.^1,2 Pioneers bound for the Willamette Valley rafted the Columbia through the rapids until the Barlow Road opened an overland route around Mount Hood, in 1845 by the Oregon Encyclopedia’s date and after 1846 by the Fort Dalles Museum’s.^1,2 In 1906 Ezra Meeker dedicated a marker naming The Dalles the End of the Oregon Trail; it now stands in The Dalles City Park.¹

Fort Dalles on the Bluff

The Army set a small post on a bluff above the river near Wascopam Mission in 1850, first named Camp Drum, and designated it Fort Dalles in 1853.⁶ After the territorial and U.S. governments forced area tribes to sign treaties in 1855, the fort served as the main depot for campaigns against tribes east of the Cascade Mountains from 1856 to 1858.^1,6 Captain Thomas Jordan directed the new buildings from an 1850 house plan book by Andrew Jackson Downing, and his civilian clerk, Louis Scholl, designed and provided plans for practically every aspect of construction.^2,6 The Oregon Encyclopedia’s town article has the fort abandoned by 1857 and its fort article has it abandoned in the summer of 1867, and Congress cut the ten-square-mile reservation in 1867 and 1871 to let the city grow.^1,6 The Gothic Revival Surgeon’s Quarters of 1856, which cost a little less than $5,000, is in the museum’s words the last remaining structure of Fort Dalles; a group of women in The Dalles campaigned to save it in 1903, and it opened as a museum in 1905.^2,6

Dalles City, Gold, and Fire

Dalles City became the county seat when Wasco County was created on January 11, 1854, was platted in 1855, and was incorporated on January 26, 1857.^1,3 It took the name The Dalles on March 22, 1860, and a city marker counts it the third oldest incorporated city in Oregon.^1,7 Gold was discovered in the interior in 1860, the earliest miners reached the city in 1862, and miners wintered in The Dalles, frequenting saloons.³ As huge wool clips and wheat yields came into The Dalles, the French brothers of Vermont founded in 1877 the French and Company Bank, which a National Register nomination calls the leading banking house.⁸ When the Northern Pacific Railroad reached The Dalles in 1883, salmon packers rushed to set up canneries there.⁹ The Umatilla House hotel, completed in 1857, was the meeting place for steamboat men, miners, sheep and cattlemen, and freighters until owner H.B. Salisbury ordered it destroyed on June 30, 1930.¹⁰ Fire burned from Second and Washington in 1871 and returned again and again; the district nomination records that a building boom followed each fire and names 1891 as the date of the worst.³ The rebuilt downtown stands as The Dalles Commercial Historic District, roughly bounded by the Columbia River and Laughlin, Fifth, and Union streets.¹¹

On April 7, 1922, a crowd packed the new three-story Civic Auditorium and Veterans Memorial to honor Wasco County’s nearly three thousand veterans of World War I.¹² The celebration lasted late into the evening, with couples dancing across the maple-floor ballroom to a ten-piece orchestra.¹²

The Dam at Celilo

The Army Corps of Engineers built The Dalles Dam two miles east of the city between 1952 and 1957, and when it went into operation on March 10, 1957, its backwater lake submerged the rapids and Celilo Falls.^1,13 The Oregon Encyclopedia puts the federal payment to the tribes for their Celilo fishing rights at $23.5 million, the Oregon History Project at nearly $27 million, and HistoryLink at $26.8 million.^13,14,15 The Harvey Aluminum smelter began operations in 1958, its fluoride emissions damaged cherry crops, and it closed again in 2000.¹ The city had about 16,000 people in 2020, and the Oregon Encyclopedia lists its top employers as the Mid Columbia Medical Center, School District #21, the Oregon Cherry Growers, and the Army Corps of Engineers.¹ Google located a data storage facility in The Dalles in 2006, drawn by inexpensive hydroelectric power and the city’s fiber-optic network.¹