A River Imaginary: Nature and Narrative in the Columbia River Gorge.

Abstract

The Columbia River, one of the most dominant geographic features of the Pacific Northwest, drains nearly 259,000 square miles of territory as it traverses local, state, and national boundaries. From its headwaters in Canada to its mouth at the Pacific Ocean, the Columbia is vitally important to those who live near it, work on it, or depend upon the hydroelectric power that comes from it. This dissertation examines the development of the Columbia through the lens of cultural history. By identifying and tracking the divergent human meanings given to the river—a corpus of ideas that I refer to as the Columbia’s river imaginary—this study reveals how popular understandings of the river ebbed and flowed with the water itself, morphing and changing as the landscape of the river was transformed by hydroelectric dams, irrigation projects, navigation improvements, and the politics of salmon conservation.

To describe these physical and cultural changes this dissertation focuses narrowly on one particular section of the river, the Columbia River Gorge, and it engages a wide array of cultural texts that describe the landscape—sources that include contemporaneous articles from local and national newspapers, federal and state government documents, tourist brochures, oral histories, environmentalist literature, folk music, photographs, landscape paintings, and documentary film. These sources reveal broad patterns in how people imagined the Columbia River’s history, its proper uses, and its relationship to the communities nearby. By tracing the patterns that emerge, this dissertation illuminates how the ‘cultural’ river and the ‘natural’ river interacted dialogically—explaining how the Columbia’s river imaginary shaped (and was shaped by) both the material ecology of the river and the political economy of the nation. This approach to the history of the Columbia reveals a dynamic but uneven process of continual reinvention, where culture and nature collide, abut, and overlap to shape the history of the river. In this analysis, cultural narratives appear not only as tools wielded, but also as the terrain upon which political, economic, and ecological contests were waged and won.