Mini Pines - Bridge Of the Gods

The Bridge of the Gods

There was a bridge across the Columbia River. Not the steel one at Cascade Locks with the toll booth and the hikers walking single file — the first one. Stone and dirt and the broken bones of a mountain, wide enough to walk across, with the river running underneath it in the dark.

For a long time, the people who told you about it were not believed.

This is the story of a tired man in a canoe who wrote down the answer in 1805 and didn’t know it. A young novelist who heard the story from Klickitat elders, believed it when nobody respectable would, and died at twenty-nine without ever learning he was right. A botanist and his wife who spent the winters of the Great Depression counting dead trees in the freezing shallows of the Columbia, racing a dam that was about to drown the evidence forever. And the tree rings that finally answered the question — not to the century, not to the decade, but to a single season.

It’s also the story of a girl named Kalliah, who was a year and a half old when the Army hanged her father, and who refused for the rest of her life to leave the river.

The mountain came down in the winter of 1446. The story survived four hundred years to tell us so.

Lamplight on the Trail — folklore, landmarks, and lost history of the Pacific Northwest.