Celilo Whirlpool

This photograph was taken by Benjamin Gifford around 1900. It shows Indian dipnetters at Celilo Falls fishing for salmon near a fishwheel.

The Dalles-Celilo area was the site of the largest Indian salmon fishery on the Columbia River prior to the construction of The Dalles Dam in the 1950s. The rapid current and rocky banks in this section of the Columbia made it ideal for fishing with dipnets, a type of fishing gear that consists of a pole with a hoop and net attached to one end. Dipnets are dipped into the water and swept downstream by the current, then taken out of the water with a scooping motion. They require whitewater to function so that migrating salmon cannot see the net.

In the 1880s dipnetters began having to compete for prime fishing sites with fishwheels, large fishing devices that used the river current to turn a wheel that caught migrating fish and deposited them in a pen. Like dipnets, fishwheels depend on swift currents to operate. Fishwheels were often placed in the best dipnetting sites, resulting in conflict between Euro-American wheel operators and Indian dipnetters.