Kettle Falls

The Kettle Falls Kettle Falls or were located in the Pacific Northwest Waterfalls in the form of cascades and rapids. The cases were in Stevens County in northeast Washington state near the Canadian border.

In the language of inland Salish they were called Shonitkwu ( loud water). 1940 disappeared in the cases artificially dammed waters of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Lake. Until then, they were one of the main fishing sites for salmon in the Pacific Northwest. Here the waters of the Columbia broke through quartzite layers that were deposited by the Missoula Floods. By damming the salmon runs demolished, were among the largest in North America.

History

Traditional way of life

Even before 7000 BC can be detected at the Kettle Falls fishing, for instance since the beginning of the Christian era, there was a constant usage by getting the same ethnic groups. Here met both groups from the areas along the Pacific as well as groups of the inland. During the fishing season, pitched up to 14 strains from June to October at the falls and threw their spears and laid their fishing baskets before Indian Iceland, an island which lay in the middle of the falls. Only the animals were killed, no longer managed the transition of the cases, and thus their spawning areas could not reach.

Trading post, missionaries, smallpox

The Briton David Thompson reached on 19 June 1811 the first white cases, which he called Ilth koy ape, according to an Indian name for the baskets that they began to fish. Thompson, who stayed two weeks, the cases described as a kind of comprehensive Rendezvous - so called the great meeting places of the trappers and fur traders - for news, business and dispute settlement. The tribes of the area participated in any armed conflict as mediators. 1825 established the Hudson 's Bay Company trading post near Fort Colville. French traders called the Colville according to the waterfall " Les Chaudières ".

Missionaries used the meeting place of so many groups to promote their religion. So campaigned here in 1838, the Catholic missionaries François Norbert Blanchet (later Archbishop of Oregon City, Portland today ) and Modeste Demers (later Bishop of Vancouver Iceland ), such as under the Sanpoil. The Jesuit missionary Pierre -Jean De Smet was born in 1841 at the waterfalls and reported that the Indians began each day up to 3,000 fish. After 1847, the Protestant missionaries disappeared from the region, but the Catholic extended their activities from the Sanpoil and inoculated them against smallpox. However, one of proselytizing groups of Kettle Falls brought smallpox to Columbia upward, and then the Sanpoil shunned the mission station at Kettle Falls.

Development of the area by the whites

1845 built by the Jesuits a mission station, the St. Paul's Mission.

1891 was above the falls a hotel, a speculative bubble was created when the railway should make a stop here. But when the railway company Northern Pacific Railway decided for another route via the farther north, Marcus, the area left many of the 300 settlers again.

Construction of the Grand Coulee Dam

With the 1933 began construction of the Grand Coulee Dam, which dammed the water about 120 m, and was created by the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Lake, disappeared the waterfalls.

In a " Ceremony of tears" mourned 8,000 to 10,000 of the affected Indian tribe, the Colville, but also ambassadors of the Yakama, Spokane, Nez Perce, Flathead, Blackfeet, Coeur d' Alene, Pend d' Oreille Tulalip and the loss of significant space. Besides the loss of self-sufficiency, because the salmon could no longer wander, to be joined ceremonies and the way to organize long-range assemblies, also disappeared graves in Indian Iceland.

Together with the flooding of the Priest Rapids, the Celilo Falls and the Cascades Rapids downriver finished the impoundment of water, the traditional lifestyle of the residents of the Colville Reservation.