White Salmon

White Salmon sits on a bluff 550 feet above the Columbia River — the town Lewis and Clark named for the white-fleshed salmon they watched the Klickitat dry on the riverbank in 1805. The villages they described were only the latest of twelve thousand years of settlement; the Missoula Floods that carved the Gorge had left the bluff itself, and the salmon runs below it fed the tribes that still hold fishing sites along the town's riverfront.

The settlers came late. Erastus and Mary Joslyn claimed 320 acres in 1853 and — in a departure from the era's practice — voluntarily paid the Klickitat for the land in blankets and flour. A.H. Jewett arrived in 1874 and became the town's father: he laid out the lots in 1891, built the waterworks, ran the first nursery east of the mountains. The town incorporated in 1907 and spent a century living on fruit orchards and timber, feuding with neighboring Bingen over the post office and the railroad station in a rivalry that outlasted the orchards themselves.

The file keeps White Salmon: the Lewis and Clark name, the Joslyns' voluntary payment, Jewett's townsite, and the bluff town that watched the river become the Gorge's windsurfing capital.

White Salmon is the archive's Gorge file — the 1805 naming, the orchard founders, and the bluff town above the Columbia.