found this food fish in almost limitless quantities in spawning season. It is said to have existed nowhere else except in one small body of water in Idaho. It was "probably a very small variety of salmon now extinct."
In the summer of 1937, visitors to Bonneville Dam saw the blocked migration of the Columbia River eels—it had never before been conceived that such countless masses of them inhabited this current. The new white concrete, in a wainscot reaching several feet above the water line, was dark and wet with spray, and this damp area was compactly fringed with eels, hanging like extensive drifts of kelp. Driven by their relentless upriver urge and obstructed by the temporarily closed floodgates, they attempted to scale the sheer and massive walls. Side by side and one below the other, they climbed up until they reached the dry portion of the masonry, upon which their bodies had no clinging suction. Then they slid down, leaving the ones below to try, then returning themselves to make the effort again and again. An eastern scholar came away disturbed and sick at the sight, and saying, "It is such a terrible demonstration of futility as to haunt the mind."
Salmon, "netted, hooked, trolled, speared, weired, scooped—salmon taken by various sleights of native skill—" composed the chief diet of the Columbia Indian tribes and was also a principal object of trade. Certain ceremonies were observed with the first fish taken: he was laid beside the water with head upstream and with salmonberries placed in his mouth; his meat was cut only with the grain; and "the hearts of all caught must be burned or eaten, and, on no account, be thrown into the water or eaten by a dog." The catches were cleaned by the women, dried and smoked, and often pulverized between two stones before being packed away in mats for trade or for winter consumption. Lewis and Clark described in great detail the fishing, curing, and packing, at Celilo Falls, where today remnants of the tribes continue to stand on the jagged rocks and spear the salmon in the rapids or dip them out with nets.
The natives also depended much on the sturgeon, and took many smaller varieties of fish to fill the winter larder. They trapped or shot wild fowl, and caught elk and deer in covered pits dug along favorite runways or feeding grounds.
The dress of the Columbia River Indians consisted principally of a robe fastened by a thong across the breast and made, usually, of the skins of cougars, wildcats, deer, bear, or elk. The most esteemed of the women's robes were made of strips of sea otter skin, interwoven with silk grass or the inner bark of the white cedar. The upriver Indians used
