Northwest Passage
The Great Columbia River
by William Dietrich
Published April 1995
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When Lewis and Clark reached the Columbia River in 1805, they found a roaring
and unruly river with a treacherous mouth and confusing course, boasting salmon
runs without equal in the world. This book reveals the heroic stories,
triumphant engineering, and disturbing degradation of this powerful, beautiful
river. Northwest Passage is an ambitious work of history, geography, and
science, a sweeping overview of the transformation of the Columbia from its
geologic origins and aboriginal inhabitants to its pioneers, settlers, dam
builders, farmers, and contemporary native Americans.
The Columbia is the second largest river, by volume, in the United States and
the largest on the west coast of the Western Hemisphere. Its terrain varies from
rain forests with more than 100 inches of precipitation a year to desert with as
little as five inches per year. It was once the most inexhaustible of rivers
with as many as 16 million fish pushing up its 1,200-mile-length each year to
spawn and die in its hundreds of tributaries. These runs supported one of the
most populous and complex native cultures on the continent. Before the European
discovery of the Columbia River, merchants dreamed of the "Great River of the
West" they believed had to exist. Then intrepid explorers set out to find this
fabled Northwest Passage.
This book tell the tale of the Columbia from its volcanic origins and Ice Age
floods to its Indians, explorers, pioneers and developers. This was a river that
nourished native cultures for thousands of years but proved frustratingly
untamed and "useless" to the Euro-American culture that followed. They set out
to transform it, and turned the Columbia's basin into the most intensively
developed river system in the world.
The Columbia today is a largely docile and productive waterway, run by
engineers and turned on and off by valves at fourteen major dams and more than
500 small ones. The obstacle course of its falls, boulders, whirlpools and
floods has been harnessed and provides 70 percent of the Northwest's energy. Yet
these dams have also permanently blocked half the region's stream miles from
fish migration and reduced wild salmon runs by 98 percent. Environmentalists
have named the Columbia one of the nation's most imperiled rivers.
Northwest Passage is the story of heroic engineering and beauty
subdued, of ancient people and brash and ambitious newcomers, of Grand Coulee,
the atomic bomb, and the watering of the arid west. It is about how people
changed the Columbia and were in turn changed by it. What happens to the
Columbia, after all, is what happens to us.
Reviews
"Dietrich's measure, thoughtful book views the
Columbia through a succession of different lenses -- as a bountiful fishery for
the Indians, as a snag-ridden and nearly impassable highway for early white
explorers, as a hugely powerful manufacturer of hydroelectricity, as a source of
irrigation for farmers, as the town drain for the mining and nuclear weapons
industries. His Columbia is really a woven braid of the many rivers of the
fisherman, the farmer, the engineer, the towboat operator, the explorer, the
industrialist. Whenever I have crossed the Columbia, I've seen an enormous muddy
enigma. Next time, I'll stop and see it altogether differently, through
Dietrich's eye."
--Jonathan Raban, author of Old Glory and Waxwings
"In this remarkable book, Bill Dietrich has taken the measure
of the Columbia. In his telling, the story of the Columbia is a grand tour of
the river's many lives and the complicated relationships between the river and
the people who have used it. Northwest Passage will be immediately
recognized as the best single book on the Columbia in print and a superb
introduction to hundreds of essential stories about the most powerful hydro
stream in North America."
--William L. Lang, director, Center for Columbia River History
"William Dietrich's love of history and the Columbia is clear
on every page of this powerful, thought-provoking work."
--Craig Lesley, author of River Song and The Sky Fisherman
"The Columbia River is a natural epic, and William Dietrich
gives us a fluent translation of the big river, its long history, its grandeur
and its great woes. Northwest Passage is a primer for anyone who cares
about the lasting music of water."
--Ivan Doig, author of Prairie Nocturne
"The most informative book I have ever read about the Columbia River."
--Murray Morgan, author of The Last Wilderness and Skid Road
"A grand narrative of the river as idea . . . the special
value of Dietrich's story is its humanity. An engaging case study of a whole
bundle of environmental and social issues (pollution, hydropower politics,
Indian rights, resource economics) that should matter to people all over the
country."
--New York Times Book Review
"A marvel of history, nature writing, politics and common
sense, extensively researched, lovingly written, and splendidly woven together
in an epic story of a magnificent river and humanity's conquest of nature."
--Los Angeles Times
"A wonderful, disturbing, and thought-provoking history of the
Columbia River, Northwest Passage is a remarkable book, first of all in
its scope and complexity. Here is a fine blend of natural history, of human
history, and of political history."
--Washington Post
"The book flows like the river itself, with information
suspended throughout its chronology as the sediment it carries out to sea . . .
Dietrich provides definitive histories of Grand Coulee Dam, the impact of
irrigation and electrification, river navigation, the sleeping monster at
Hanford, (and) a concise profile of the salmon."
--Portland Oregonian
"A must-read for anyone interested in the interplay of
technology, nature, and human ambition."
--Kirkus Reviews
"Dietrich expertly incorporates the viewpoints of myriad
sources who have taken a passionate interest in one of our greatest natural
resources."
--Audubon
"Dietrich offers us two books in one. The first having to do
with the settlement and development of the river and the second, the basin's
environmental downfall, including some modern, quixotic efforts to make it not
seem like one."
--Wilderness Magazine
hardcover / $26.00 / Simon & Schuster / 067179650X / April 1995
paperback / $18.95 / University of Washington Press / 0295975466 /
June 2003 |
