Dredging the Columbia River at the expense of tribal and aquatic communities, Part I
Published 2:00 am Saturday, September 26, 2026
By Josephine Woolington/High Country News
The seagoing hopper dredge Clatsop, circa 1938, doing maintenance dredging at the Skamokawa Bar on the Columbia River. (Courtesy/U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)
During low tide on the Columbia River, Chinook tribal members push a traditional style canoe called Skakwal (which means “Lamprey Eel” in Chinuk wawa) toward the sea during the annual First Salmon Ceremony. (Amiran White/High Country News)
An aerial photo from 1938 shows the Sand Island Pile Dike System. This island was a traditional Chinook fishing location. (Courtesy/U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)
Vessels parked near Rice Island in the Columbia River. (Danny Miller/The Daily Astorian)
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has transformed the estuary and robbed the river of sediment over the last century.
The story of people and the lower Columbia River has always centered around canoes. Varying shapes and styles were built to navigate the river’s varying shapes and elements. There were canoes for shallow water and deep water, canoes to cut through currents and travel upstream, canoes for clamming, fishing and whale hunting.
Chinookan canoe construction reflected the diversity of the region’s people and the lower Columbia, comprising a vast 146-mile estuary from the river’s mouth to the western Columbia River Gorge. The most famous and largest canoes measured up to 60 feet long, designed to navigate powerful wind and waves near the river’s mouth and big enough for three tons of people and cargo. Among the smallest were 10- to 14-foot canoes made for gathering wapato, a wetland plant with emerald, arrowhead-shaped leaves and edible potato-like tubers. The boats were sleek, light enough to carry under one arm and ideal for the slow-moving shallow waters around present-day Portland, where wapato thrived.
Canoes decorated the river’s sandy shorelines. Villages lined its banks. Before the 1800s, no levees separated the waterway from the floodplain. No dams blocked salmon. Cold water roared over rapids and sighed through the estuary. Braided channels thick with insects and songbirds curved through marshy bottomlands. Minnows, suckers and sturgeon filled the clear backwater tidal sloughs. These extensive channels snaked through the broad estuary like veins from the region’s heart, the Columbia, known as wimaɬ to upper Chinookan peoples and iyagaytɬ imaɬ to the lower Chinookans at the river’s mouth. The habitat supported one of the world’s largest salmon runs, when 10 to 16 million salmon and steelhead returned from the ocean to spawn in their ancestral rivers.
The Columbia sustained so much life in part because of an often-overlooked element of river ecology: sediment. Tiny particles of sand, silt and clay built and maintained the estuary’s wetlands. When rivers are allowed to twist and turn and spill out of their banks, nutrient-loaded sediments settle across floodplains. Deltas, sandbars and marshes form. These habitats support not only plants and fish, but also human cultures; Chinookan peoples along the lower Columbia comprised one of North America’s densest civilizations. International commerce flourished for millennia, fueling emporiums like Celilo Falls. Canoes carved to handle the river in all its complexity carried tubers, hides, shells, beads and salmon. Moving sandbars created some of the most productive fishing sites. “The sediments and the soils are the foundation of humanity,” said Roger Amerman, a geologist, artist, elder and citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma who specializes in Columbia Plateau tribal histories. “Not just our culture, but all cultures.
“If that’s poisoned or removed,” he said of sediment, “we’re impoverished, in every kind of way.”
But the early United States saw the millimeter-sized particles as an obstacle to economic growth. In 1824, when Congress tasked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to “improve” navigation on the nation’s rivers for commerce, sand impeded the cargo vessels that replaced Chinookan canoes. Sand grounded ships with drafts so deep that they scraped the riverbed. The Columbia’s powerful mouth was especially dangerous, where river and ocean currents collided, creating sandbars hidden below white water and earning it the nickname “the graveyard of the Pacific.”
By the 1860s, the Corps, a military and civil-works engineering agency within the U.S. Army, started dredging the riverbed to create a 107-mile international shipping channel through the estuary, from the river’s mouth to Portland. The agency installed dozens of water-control structures that altered the flow and sediment, squeezing the waterway into a narrow, faster channel suited for vessels heavy with gold, wheat and timber. Later, between the 1930s and 1970s, the Corps and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation built a series of hydropower dams upriver that further inhibited water and sediment to flood the estuary while also severing fish migration, devastating salmon populations and tribal lifeways.
The Corps helped fulfill the long-held colonial vision of the Columbia as an imperial river. Before Europeans even saw the waterway, they dreamed of “the Great River of the West,” as the French labeled it on maps, where profits would flow. While Chinookan peoples built boats to fit the river, the Corps built the river to fit boats. That legacy endures today, here and along the country’s other largest rivers, through flood control, dredging, navigation locks, dams, jetties and levees.
At 43 feet deep and 600 feet wide, the Columbia’s current channel is nearly three times its natural depth and half its width in places. Wetland-replenishing sediments are largely trapped behind upriver dams like Bonneville. Sand that slips past the concrete barriers is dredged out and piled elsewhere in and along the river. A 2005 report by the National Marine Fisheries Service, the agency tasked with overseeing salmon recovery, found that dredging and filling in wetlands has been one of the major causes of habitat loss in the estuary over the last century. Seventy percent of the river’s marshes have been eliminated. More than one-third of its salmon and steelhead populations are extinct, and those that remain are at risk, listed under the federal Endangered Species Act.
The Corps has long framed dredging as a necessary chore that causes minimal ecological and cultural harm. Each year, under the agency’s command, 6 to 9 million cubic yards of sediment, mostly sand, is vacuumed out to keep giant freighters packed with wheat, petroleum, fertilizer, cars and electronics — $31.2 billion worth of goods — moving up and down the lower river. So much sand has been removed — piled on land, on river islands, in the river outside the shipping channel, in the ocean — that officials now say they’re running out of places to put it. If too much sand piles underwater in bars or shoals, the Corps would have to issue draft restrictions for commercial vessels, limiting their cargo. “We’ll eventually reach a point where we’re not keeping up with the shoaling to maintain that channel,” said Dan Robledo, who is managing the Corps’ 20-year, $578.7 million plan for dumping sand. The agency published its final report in early May.
In an emailed statement, Kerry Solan, public affairs chief for the Corps’ Portland district office, wrote that while the lower Columbia has been altered by a “variety of factors or parties,” the agency’s navigation mission can “contribute positively to the estuary’s health.” The Corps claims it can rebuild wetlands using dredged sand, although it lacks a restoration plan and budget. Tribal leaders warn that the agency’s plan will continue to harm culturally significant and treaty-protected species, like salmon, lamprey and sturgeon, especially as the ongoing climate crisis warms the river and weakens its flow.
“There’s a misleading effort made to say this is necessary for the economy,” said Kathleen George, a tribal council member and ceremonial fisher for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, which includes several Chinookan bands whose ancestral homelands span much of the estuary. Commerce has always flowed on the river, not in steel cargo containers but in canoes. “It is often presented as if the economies of the people who rely upon salmon and steelhead and sturgeon and lamprey are not important,” she said.
“We are prioritizing other values on the back of our river.”
Up close, tan, white and gray flecks of quartz sparkle and sift softly through your fingers. Depending on where you are on the river, the grains vary in size. Downstream of the Cowlitz River near Longview, Washington, pumice and other volcanic sediments from the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens still thicken the river. The sand is lighter, finer, measuring about .2 millimeters. Other tributaries deliver coarser sands, sometimes up to 4 millimeters.
Underwater, sand settles. Miniscule transparent crustaceans that feed salmon find shelter here. Young eyeless and toothless lamprey burrow their tubular bodies in the grit, while 800-pound, 12-foot-long sturgeon — the ancient “grandfathers of the river,” George calls them — use their chin whiskers to locate critters in the murky bottom.
A natural riverbed has texture. Thick mud-like sediments entomb tree snags. Currents tug and pull sand into mounds.
Like all major rivers, the Columbia carries sand and other sediments. From its glacial headwaters in southern British Columbia, it churns through granite mountains, snatching quartz from rugged landforms and eventually pounding it into sand. Along its 1,243-mile journey, through high-desert basalt plateaus and the deep forested gorge cut by the waterway through the Cascade Range, the river is joined by a dozen major tributaries that contribute more sand along with glacial and lowland gravel, silt and clay. The Columbia gathers and grinds these sediments from as far away as the Grand Tetons and exhales them into its estuary, primarily from April to July, when snowmelt and heavy spring rains swell the river to its highest flow, called the spring freshet.
Sediments are deposited when water slows down, commonly at riverbends, like at Kelley Point Park in North Portland. The landscape has been heavily altered by the Army Corps at the now-channelized confluence of the Columbia and Willamette rivers. Here, the hard basalt of the Tualatin Mountains forces the Columbia to curve northward, creating the notch of Oregon’s northwestern corner. As the river navigates the bend, sediments drop out. Before the Corps, sand could spread out, then smaller silts and clays settled on top, creating mushy new ground. Sand itself lacks nutrients, but the finer-grained materials are packed with phosphorus and nitrogen that encourage plant growth, replenishing and sustaining wetlands.
The process of eroding and building land is fundamental to a river, a constant if slow-moving geographical revision. Over millennia, mountains become tidal marshes. At Kelley Point and other sandy beaches, visitors can still hold this history — miniscule quartz fragments possibly 300 million years old — in a single handful of sand.
In the upper Chinookan language, the Kelley Point Park area is known as wakshin, “the dammed-up place.” Sandbars, snags and marshes created wetlands so dense that, in the early 1800s, Lewis and Clark initially missed the present-day entrance to the Willamette. Chinookan canoes, their bows and sterns chiseled with elaborate images of animals, were pulled up along the shorelines of nearby sandy islands. At that time, Kelley Point essentially connected to Sauvie Island to the north. Only during high water, like the spring freshet, would the land masses separate into an obvious confluence like today’s.
This was the first place that the Army Corps reshaped in Oregon, beginning in the 1860s. Portland-bound ships frequently bottomed out just downstream, where the river was sometimes only 6 feet deep. Portland officials tried to dredge the shifting sandbars but petitioned Congress to send engineers from the Corps to take over. “The amount of commerce to be benefited by the completion of this work is very great,” said Major Robert Williamson, who oversaw the Corps’ first projects along the Columbia and Willamette. Like many early Corps leaders, Williamson graduated from West Point, the U.S. military academy overseen by the Corps, which created a steady stream of engineers to, among other missions, transform the nation’s waterways. Before the Civil War, he surveyed portions of California and Oregon for railroad routes. But shipping heavy materials, like wheat from eastern Oregon, Washington and Idaho — still among the Columbia’s primary exports — was cheaper by water, even after transcontinental railroad lines arrived.
By 1869, under Williamson’s command, the Corps dug a 17-foot-deep channel using a Portland dredge vessel. The gray sand filled marshes to build port facilities, and throughout the Portland area, people “with real estate stars in their eyes” used river sand to create developable land, historian and Portland State University professor emeritus Carl Abbott said.
To eliminate sandbars, Williamson super-vised the construction of wing dams, or pile dikes. The structures, still visible today, comprise a series of logs that reach toward the middle of the river diagonally across the current, gathering sand and diverting the flow away from the shoreline and toward the shipping channel. The water’s increased velocity scours loose sand in the riverbed.
Over the decades, the Corps built 233 wing dams on the lower Columbia and created 15 islands from scratch, many of which span several thousand feet, strategically placed with one goal: narrow the river and quicken its flow.
Still, local officials and industry leaders craved an even deeper Columbia. Portland shippers lobbied the Corps for a deep riverbed and safe passage through the river mouth to accommodate bigger ships, helping ports compete with those in deep salt water, like Seattle and Vancouver, B.C. In 1878, the Corps dredged the Columbia to 20 feet. By 1976, after vessels ballooned with the advent of steel shipping containers, the river was dug to 40 feet.
In the 2000s, the Corps deepened the channel to its current 43 feet. The additional 3 feet allowed companies to pack 10,000 more tons of cargo onto ships traveling
to and from China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia and elsewhere. Their bottoms narrowly skirt the riverbed, sometimes by just 2 feet. “Would I rather have a 50-foot channel?” Bill Wyatt, former executive director of the Port of Portland, told The Oregonian in 2010. “Yeah. But we’re going to make 43 feet work.”
While Chinookan peoples built boats to fit the river, the Corps built the river to fit boats.
Today, Kelley Point Park is a sliver of green at the tip of North Portland’s industrial thumb. Freighters dwarf the cottonwood trees and leave wakes that slap the shorelines. Hyundais fresh from South Korea glitter at the neighboring Port of Portland terminal. Tugboats hum. The park marks the present-day confluence of the Willamette and Columbia, but the waterways’ joining was constructed by the Corps. Where marsh vegetation once thickened Kelley Point’s northernmost beach, a wing dam stretches out. It looks more like an abandoned dock than a water-control device. Currents whirl around the logs where cormorants perch.
To the untrained eye, the river looks natural, a blue-gray expanse flowing toward the ocean much as it has for millennia. The Corps’ changes are immense, yet subtle. Reshaping sediment isn’t as brazen as the walls of concrete that block the Columbia upriver. “People think the river is free-flowing once we get past the dams,” said Rachel Cushman, secretary-treasurer of the Chinook Tribal Council and a citizen of the Chinook Indian Nation, whose unceded homelands surround both the Oregon and Washington sides of the river west of Longview to the river’s mouth. “It’s very much engineered to flow the way that it does.”
This is Part I of a two-part story. Part II will appear in The Astorian’s Weekend Break on Oct. 3.
This story first appeared in High Country News.
Josephine Woolington is a writer and musician in her hometown, Portland, Oregon. She is the author of Where We Call Home: Lands, Seas, and Skies of the Pacific Northwest, which won a 2024 Oregon Book Award for Nonfiction.
