July 22 was in some ways the climax of the Columbia River Historical Expedition, as the group spent the day dedicating the grandest monument built as a part of the Great Northern’s historical tours–and also the only one not immediately adjacent to a GN or SP&S right of way. Standing 125 feet tall, the Astoria Column has a 164-stair spiral staircase inside leading to a viewing platform near the top. The outside of the column is decorated with a spiral history of the Columbia, featuring Robert Gray, Lewis & Clark, the Astoria fur traders, early pioneers, and the coming of the railroad.

The Astor Column in 2011. Wikimedia commons photo by Another Believer.

The column was designed by Electus Litchfield (who had also designed the Camp Disappointment obelisk) and modeled after Trajan’s Column in Rome. It was built by A. Guthrie, a St. Paul construction company that had long been an important contractor for the Great Northern. Guthrie was digging the 7.9-mile Cascade Tunnel at the same time as it was building the Astor Column, and in 1930 it would receive the contract to build the Great Northern’s California extension from Bend, Oregon. The column’s exterior frescoes were by Attilio Pusteria, an Italian artist who immigrated to the United States in about 1900. Only about a third of these frescoes were completed by the time the expedition arrived to dedicate the column; Pusteria finished them by the end of October, 1926.

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After an overnight train trip from Spokane, the expedition arrived in the railroad town of Fallsbridge, Washington, on the Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway on July 20. Fallsbridge got its name from the Oregon Trunk bridge across the Columbia River which was just downstream from Celilo Falls, which–measured by volume of water–was one of the largest waterfalls in the world until they were flooded by the Dalles Dam in 1956.

The Wishram monument consists of two pillars of columnar basalt rock bound together by iron straps with a small plaque. As a work of art it is considerably more original than an obelisk, but as a monument it fails to draw the eye of train passengers, even those getting on or off the train at the Wishram station 100 feet away. There was once a half-mile trail from the monument to Celilo Falls, where Indians once speared and netted salmon by the hundreds, but the falls were inundated by the Dalles Dam and salmon mostly disappeared with them. Wikimedia commons photo by Williamborg. Click image for a larger view.

However, to mark this occasion, Ralph Budd decided to rename the town Wishram–an Indian word meaning “people who never move,” referring to pictographs on nearby rocks. (Wishram is also the name of a local Indian tribe.) There, they dedicated a monument “To the memory of those dauntless pathfinders and pioneers who followed the great thoroughfare of the Columbia at this place.”

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After an overnight trip, the group arrived in Fort Union for a second Indian Congress organized by the GN. The eleven tribes that participated in 1925 all returned and were joined by representatives of the Cheyenne tribe from the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana. In addition to providing such spectacles as dances, races, making pipes from pipestone, and talking in sign language, the Indians, one historian reported, were happy to “partake of the liberal rations of the Great Northern commissary.”

Not content with giving out copies of the Fort Union paper that had been issued in 1925, Budd had Flandrau write another paper about Fort Union and other forts and other activities from Iowa to Great Falls, Montana. Click image to download an 15-MB PDF of this booklet.

The condescending attitudes that whites of the 1920s felt toward Indians would be politically incorrect today, but they were a great improvement from a century before, when many people considered Native Americans “varmints” suitable only for extermination. “We thought as little of killing one of them as killing a wild cat or a bear; in fact, even less, for the skin of either of these is worth something and therefore we didn’t wish to see them exterminated,” an “old settler” in Oregon told George Bennett, the founder of Bandon, Oregon (as reported in the December, 1927 Oregon Historical Quarterly).

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For students and others who lived east or south of Chicago, the Columbia River Historical Expedition began in Chicago on the morning of Thursday, July 15. Echoing the subject of the students’ oratory, they heard a lecture from historian and Chicago Historical Society librarian Caroline McIlvaine about the French Pioneers in the Chicago area.

Expedition members received this ornate itinerary with 35 pages of information about the trip. Click image to download an 11.7-MB PDF of this program.

After lunch at “Mrs. Potter’s Tea Room” (probably referring to Mrs. Palmer’s Tea Room, a restaurant in the Palmer House, one of Chicago’s top hotels), the group made rather brief visits to the Chicago Art Institute, Field Museum, and Lincoln Park before boarding a train that departed Union Station at 6 pm.

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