A few times a year, when the crowded shelves of my university library and the cramped apartments in this college town threaten to bury me, I go to the river.

It’s a 20-mile journey, although a red-tailed hawk could do it in a dozen. To get there, I drive up out of town, cross the state highway, and move through the rolling hills, held in place by a century and a half of wheat and before that by bunchgrasses sinking their roots into loess so deep as to be practically bottomless. Soon, the road banks and opens up next to Union Flat Creek along which the area’s first homesteaders planted their stakes. Old farmhouses and rusting equipment sit beside new combines and tractors off short spur roads and long gravel driveways that branch off the route I’m driving like trickling tributaries to the main stem. On backroads around here, I often see signs nailed to barns—SAVE OUR DAMS—a talisman meant to ward off environmentalists who wish to breach dams so that salmon abundance might be restored to regional streams. When I reach the stop sign, I turn and descend Wawawai Canyon, where over the course of a half-dozen miles I wind my way down 1600 feet. The canyon is narrow and the hills so steep I cannot always see their tops from the pavement. The angles are severe enough that every time I see the cattle and game trails that skirt the curves like topo lines on a map, I marvel at the feats of faunal engineering, certain that there must be scores of skeletons littering the gully below, the result of one misstep or a fatal gust of wind. The road traces Wawawai Creek until it pools at the bottom of the hill into a small pond in a county park, which leaks out beneath a railroad bridge into the Snake River.

During the thirty-minute drive, fast-food restaurants and car dealerships yield to farms and then to ranches and then the empty banks of the Snake, which pulls me like a current—not only downstream but also into a past.

All places contain ghost landscapes when you see them as a historian does, which is to say, how I do. Buried beneath today’s scenic vista lies all of the yesterdays, layered one upon another, accreting with passing memories and moments. I obsess over this interplay of place and time. It is where I live, where I think; it is how I chart the world. And I wonder how anyone could plot their universe otherwise. Even if it does mean being constantly confronted by loss.

***

Late one July afternoon, I sat at a picnic table beside the river. The sun shone in my face as I stared across the water toward the basalt walls rising vertically from the surface. The cliffs were dark, especially in the shadows that stretched across their face. Above were the plains. In the quick weeks of spring, everything but the rocks is frosted in green, but the summer hills are singed brown by relentless sun. Only in the folds between soil and rock do slivers of green flora darken the scene and suggest any sort of plenty. That and the river itself, for water is life.

The river lapped at the rock retaining wall next to me—slap, slap, slap—a steady beat, almost tidal, from the wake of the white sternwheeler carrying tourists near the far shore, churning downstream in the shadows. This curious boat, reminiscent of the Mississippi and Mark Twain, invited reverie.

But Life on the Mississippi was the wrong script. More apt would be The Journals of Lewis and Clark. Fortunately, I owned a copy, a small paperback abridgment with the two captains on the cover, one of them wearing fringed buckskin and pointing west.

Digging around in the past, hoping to unearth some discovery, was a long-held habit. As a boy of six or seven, I took a shovel out to a huge cedar tree in the field behind our barn and chickenhouse, a long and skinny building that once held more than 20,000 laying hens. Near that tree, I had it on good authority (my mom) that a house once stood. We lived on the Tulalip Indian Reservation, so maybe I believed that I could dig up Native American artifacts. I recall that I shoveled very little dirt, wandered a little toward the creek, and got bored quickly. Still, family stories about a farm in Texas and school history classes about wars long ago beckoned to me in ways formulas and periodic tables never did.

So it really is little surprise that the Journals sat on my bookshelves through many moves—to college, to grad school, to jobs. Although I thought I purchased my copy when I was about ten or twelve, I learned when I slid the book off my shelf that instead it was a gift for my fourteenth birthday from my oldest brother, who was then three months away from starting his first job as a high school history teacher. We shared a family proclivity toward the past, but neither of us might have anticipated these recent days when I visit the river and, without fail, summon Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery who had been here.

***

The Snake glides along this stretch, smooth and wide, with few signs of human intervention other than the road that parallels the river on what Clark would have called the starboard side—“Stard.” or “Std.” in the downstream journals. I find myself searching the hills and gullies and shoreline with eyes conscious that Lewis and Clark saw this same wrinkled topography. The idea entices me. I’m following a cultural cue received especially by western white boys and the men they become: the intrepid explorer meeting every challenge land or water might pose, clothed in undaunted courage, pressing into uncharted territory. I know this is wrong. I realize the Niimíipuu, or Nez Perce, children upstream know other narratives. But on those evenings at the river when the coyotes’ yipping echoes off the cliffs and hawks screech to one another and I feel the warm setting sun kissing my skin damp with sweat, I forget.

Perhaps I can be forgiven my error. Members of the most famous exploration party in American history described this scene in terms much like my own observations. Sergeant Patrick Gass’s assessment could be used today with scant revision: “The country on both sides is high dry prairie plains without a stick of timber. There is no wood of any kind to be seen except a few small willows along the shore; so that it is with difficulty we can get enough to cook with. The hills on the river are not very high, but rocky; the rocks of a dark colour.” Those same dark rocks and willows outline the same riverscape I am sitting in. Sergeant John Ordway reported simply: “the country is barron and broken.” It was barren then; it is barren now.

In such descriptions, physical space dominates even if it is a negative space, an emptiness. Barren, it is worth remembering, is a synonym for empty womb.

But a lively social space also appears in the journals. The day the Corps paddled through these very waters for thirty northwesterly miles they passed at least eleven different places with signs of a Native home, several sites with multiple lodges and the majority inhabited. At least four times they stopped and purchased food from those who lived along the river where creeks trickled in. The Corps bought dogs to eat—thirteen or fifteen, sources disagree—along with “Sammon,” dried cherries, and camas roots.

Today, those vibrant shores are vacated; the social space has become as barren as the hills.

***

While my first thoughts of Lewis and Clark plying the waters elicit waves of boyish enthusiasm, my mind skips to the ghosts and I’m flooded with the tragedy of absence, and although I don’t know it personally or culturally, the sense of loss here seeps through the cracks in the basalt into the very air.

At the river’s edge, I think of Sergeant Ordway, a few miles downstream, writing his daily report, the story of one day among his hundreds penetrating the West. The day’s story that plucks at my interest is October 11, 1805, when he stopped here, where I am resting in thought. Perhaps Ordway sat down before the sun dropped into the Snake and scrawled his notes in twilight. Or maybe he hunched beside a campfire, hoping for warmth and light to help him finish this task. I confess that I prefer the campfire scene, because a Naxiyamtáma, or Snake River-Palouse, oral tradition, retold by the elder Gordon Fisher, explains “How Beaver Brought Fire” from the Conifers to the Animal People at Wawáwi. Ordway’s campfire might have been difficult to maintain, since he reported the party could “Scarsely git wood enofe to cook a little victules.” As he thought back over the dozens of miles he “roed” that day, the sergeant noted they “passed over Some rapids where the waves roled high.” These rapids are gone; I know a sinking feeling from their submergence.

That sinking feeling is familiar; it’s settled in my soul. It accompanies me wherever I go in the West, the place I’ve always lived and the region where I’ve always focused my historian’s eyes. What you see today when you stand beside the water at Wawawai is a river spanning half a mile, reaching across to the basalt columns rising and blending into the plains above. You hear lapping water and whooshing wind. What I see as a historian is something else, something not always there, something spectral but true. I hear the voices of the river and its people stilled, the rapids silenced and laughter quieted. The ghost landscape, if you only look—and I can’t help looking—hangs everywhere just out of sight, like a fish barely beyond the shallows.

When I squint, staring upstream to the days gone by, I make out a set of rapids and weirs with Palouse and Nez Perce men taking salmon, and women drying them ashore. Gazing downstream, I also see the orchards and vineyards planted and nurtured later in this small canyon full of sun, well-watered for a steep semi-desert. But now, only the barrenness.

Yet there are stories, I know.

My need to story the landscapes I travel through and live within comes from a compulsion I do not remember ever not having. As a boy, I could imagine the details however I wanted. I could invent. But becoming a historian means those stories now must emerge only from the traces of truth that the past leaves on its journey toward tomorrow.

***

The traces here sometimes feel suitable for fiction.

1878. While grading the road, presumably the predecessor to the one I drive to the river, workers unearthed a fossil from 30 feet below, embedded in rock. Undoubtedly human, said all the reports—but a “mammoth” human. Extrapolating from the fossilized bone, experts determined the body would have been thirty-three feet tall, weighing around five thousand pounds. No further explanation appears.

1881. After several years of haggling over a land claim at Wawawai, one Mr. J. W. Offield, a former member of the Oregon legislature, began to tear away the fence of one Mr. H. Montgomery. While Montgomery “remonstrated with him without avail,” according to the stilted contemporary report, Offield grabbed his shotgun that rested near a locust tree. Although his little boy cried and begged his father not to shoot, Offield aimed and fired. Montgomery, hit just below his heart, said, “Oh! my God!” and collapsed, dead at the fenceline. An account in a Sacramento newspaper concluded, “Great excitement prevails over the tragedy.” No further information is available.

1886. In June, Captain Sampson, the purser who served on the Baker, a Snake River steamer, reported a toddler, no more than two years old, found in the river near Wawawai wearing new buttoned shoes and a black and white beaded neck chain, along with red flannel and wool clothes. She had been in the water for a week, maybe ten days. No further identification is offered.

Drama takes many forms, but life consists more often of the mundane. The texture of daily life at Wawawai is littered in the record from the end of the nineteenth century:

• 2500 tons of flaxseed stored in 1882.
• The steamer Gates dropped off nine tons of merchandise in 1883.
• A new steel tramway was being constructed in 1887 to bring wheat from the hills above down to the river.
• The following year, J. B. Holt grew a sweet potato weighing 12 pounds.
• In spring 1889, just two seasons before statehood ended the territorial period, the community’s coming of age appeared certain to the local Pullman Herald: “Wawawai is fast assuming the proportions of a village. There are 15 or 16 pleasant homes within a radius of two miles, most of whom have nice orchards and cozy cottages surrounded by shrubbery, ornamental trees and grasses.” Within this arcadian scene, local children attended a school, walking amid fragrant fruit blossoms and wildflowers wafting through the air. “In a short time,” the newspaper believed, “it is safe to predict that every foot of available fruit land in the Snake River bluffs will soon be utilized.”

And for decades, this community along the river grew its fruit and consolidated its operations, forming new communities for peaches and profit.

I see these communities in the ghost landscape, too, just above the weirs, out of sight but not beyond memory. As a river flowing over stones reverses back on itself and gathers energy, the losses compound. Another loss, another culture shifted in time and space, another economy shunted aside for progress.

***

This transformation may cause in me the greatest sense of loss, because it occurred in my lifetime and because it reversed the usual metamorphosis from bland to beautiful. In 1975, Lower Granite Dam blocked the river just around the bend. The prosaic nomenclature of the dam—unquestionably inferior to the evocative Wawawai—matched the drab concrete architecture no different from countless other dams laid down across the West to aid navigation and generate power. But these dams in the twenty-first century also aid extinction and generate resentment across western riverscapes once full of fish and homes.

The lie I tell myself alongside the river is that this is the same place the Corps of Discovery paddled through, but like all lies, this one cannot bear the weight of scrutiny. I now see that the basalt columns are stained whitish-gray, the infamous bathtub ring caused by fluctuating reservoir levels. The anadromous fish that brought the Palouse and Nez Perce to these rapids, where salmon swam headlong upstream and jumped over and over to clear them, are so reduced that fishing seasons are limited or closed. More extreme are the measures taken to stock these streams.

On my most recent trip to the river, just as the balsamroot’s sunshine faces dotted the hillsides, my wife and I walked downstream while the tugboat Randy S chugged away from the dam pushing two red-bottomed, gray-decked barges, one marked as carrying steelhead and the other king salmon. “It seems like it would be easier to just let the fish swim,” my wife said wryly.

This is where we are. Within sight of where Ordway scrawled his story of high-rolling waves, these juvenile fish, rather than swimming freely, are contained and transported, much as the Nez Perce were at the end of the war of 1877—separated from homelands. We make fish in hatcheries now, not rivers.

My academic training furnishes a variety of analytical tools and models to interpret this landscape of loss. I can rely on settler colonialism, a framework that emerged out of ethnography and widely applied in history. I can adopt an analysis that examines the envirotechnical system created on the river, a framework developed by historians of technology and environment. I can deploy coupled human and natural systems theory, a framework with roots in too many natural and social sciences to mention. But I drop down to the river for visceral experiences, to feel history moving on the wind, not ethereal theory pervading academic journals.

The river and its cultures aren’t only intellectual puzzles to be solved but histories to be felt. What I feel, rattling in my bones, are the stories ghost landscapes tell.

***

Truthfully, I sometimes wish I didn’t hear these stories and couldn’t hear the absent voices. Knowing this history can feel like a burden. If only, I muse, I just saw beauty in this land instead of the brutality that mingles with it. I’d see rocks and plants instead and note the sparkling water. I’d hear birdsongs and waves, and might not lament the powerlines stretched along the ridge or the fish no longer teeming in the currents. But that’s like asking for ignorance, and I know this is no responsible choice.

Still, when the river pulls and I descend to it, I imagine its different pasts. I see Indigenous people fishing abundant salmon at the rapids now submerged. I see the Corps of Discovery taking notes about these hills and trading for dogs and dried food. I see steamers loading fruit and unloading goods at bustling communities. But Lower Granite and all the other dams foreclosed that history, smothered those landscapes in the unsparing logic of the engineer and planner.

The essayist Scott Russell Sanders once wrote, “I am suspicious of the logic that would forestall occasional floods by creating a permanent one.” As I gaze across the placid reservoir that has replaced the wild rapids of the Snake, I share his skepticism.

And when I can take it no longer, when the inescapable weight of history becomes uncomfortable to bear and my imaginative longings push me toward depression, I head back home, climbing the canyon.

I sense the Naxiyamtáma with their Niimíipuu relatives and neighbors tending plants—perhaps the bitterroot—here before the reservation. I imagine the erstwhile horticulturists eking out their living—harvesting Muscat grapes—before reservoir waters flooded their vineyards. As I ascend further, I see a few ranchers still at it, their Angus cattle clinging unnaturally to those precipitous hills.

Early one summer evening, I meet a truck coming down the steep twisting road without guardrails. It pulls a ski-boat, heading for the boat launch I just left, planning for a couple hours of carefree recreation. This playtime, uncomplicated by the ghosts, I cannot quite fathom. I don’t know the unfolding story for those boaters, but their world, too, will know change. And someday, a historian like me may lament what they lost when the dams were breached.

But I will cheer the ghost reservoir.