The Oregon Hotel is old, rickety, and delightful. It sits in the middle of the state, in the small town of Mitchell.
Weather has me holed up here — snowstorms to the east, rain to the west — and a good night's sleep eludes me. The reason: some drunk hunter in room 2C is blaring show tunes on his television, his violent snores drifting through the pauses in the music.
I look for a way to fall asleep, so I turn on the television set. The Hills Have Eyes is playing. It's 2:31 a.m., and I'm being entertained by the gruesome death of a family being eaten and tortured in the New Mexico desert.
When the movie ends, I can still hear the snores and strange sounds above me. I try to duplicate the noise by flipping through the channels, but nothing matches. No such station exists.
Abandoned house outside of Madras, Oregon.
I thump the ceiling with my hands, making the old bed creak, but the music and snoring don't stop. So I go outside and sit on the hotel steps, my hands folded around my head.
The night is still and mild. Then a noise breaks the silence — a shuffling. I lift my eyes and freeze. A bear — a big one — stares back at me.
I focus and see he's behind a cage, a sideshow attraction for the gas station next door. Henry the Bear, poor creature, came here as a rescued cub, the story goes. No one else would take Henry, so here he sits, forever awakened by cars and drunks.
I stare back. His sorrow makes me forget the gruesome movie and consider my own situation. Three years ago, my brother and I found a stone tool in the Owyhee desert of southeastern Oregon, and I've been searching ever since to understand the people who may have left it there so long ago.
Flashes of snow to the east diverted me here. I'd hoped to continue my search for more stones along the John Day River's arid, rocky landscape. This isn't my first time in Mitchell; last time I was pursuing the same mystery — and ended up here too, stuck. Maybe I'm like Henry: big dreams of Oregon's wild, but still caged by circumstance.
I've tried to reconstruct the stone's history through travel, learning things I never imagined about how Oregon's diverse tribes have lived, eaten, survived, and moved across the land. I've learned a little about their origins — but am I any closer to answers?
I don't know how to say goodbye to a bear, but as I close the door on the old hotel, I hear him groan softly. Back in my room, the show tunes and snores resume. Infuriated, I stand on the bed and pound the ceiling with my fist. Nothing helps. Again, I flip through the TV channels, but no station matches the noise above me.
A few minutes later, someone pounds on the door upstairs. Then come shouts, arguing, and finally, cheering from other rooms. I wake the next day at noon.
The Great River of the West
Mitchell lies at the southern end of the Columbia Plateau — a vast flood basalt region spanning much of northern Oregon, eastern Washington, and western Idaho. Through its center runs the dividing line between Oregon and Washington: the Columbia River, the Pacific Northwest's largest.
While the Native histories I've followed so far unfolded in harsh deserts and on lean coasts, the Columbia's abundance supported large permanent villages and a vast trade network. The Chinookan people settled in villages along the river's banks, from its mouth up to The Dalles, trading deep into the Plateau lands on both sides.
Lupine and Indian paintbrush in wet meadows of the Cascades.
Following a tip of better weather along the Columbia, I drive west and north toward the deep, wet canyon of the Columbia River Gorge. Within this gorge lies much of the Chinookan story. Upriver, the Columbia gave up another chapter: Kennewick Man, an 8,500-year-old skeleton found on its banks in 1996. Since then, DNA analysis (2015) showed he was more closely related to Native Americans than to any other people, and in 2017 the Columbia Plateau tribes reburied him.
Two Students of the Stone Age
Months earlier, I met a small group learning to build traditional salmon-fishing tools. They carved delicate spear tips from dogwood along the creeks that descend from Mount Hood into the Columbia. I sat with them on the rocks beside the river.
One student was a forty-five-year-old, clean-cut man with the bearing of a military pilot. A Republican, he believed the world — or at least North America — was on the brink of collapse, undone by environmental and political decay. "My family doesn't listen to me," he said. "But when it happens, they won't make it. I will — because I'm learning what it takes to survive."
The other student was much younger, with long hair and muted green clothes. Between jobs and studies, he'd traded his car for a bicycle. "It's not just the emissions," he said. "It's everything that goes into making cars." He wasn't preparing for apocalypse; he was drawn to the wild itself.
As we talked, he quietly struck two stones together, knapping one into the shape of an axe — a skill he'd been practicing for weeks. Then he led me down the dry riverbed, identifying edible plants along the way. "Try this," he said, handing me miner's lettuce and other small greens. You could live this way — plants in the riverbed, roots on the tributary slopes, berries in the mountains, and salmon or steelhead in nearly every season. People did, for a very long time: at Five Mile Rapids near The Dalles, archaeologists have shown salmon were being caught at least 9,000 years ago.
Still, hunting and gathering in the gorge had little to do with a stone tool from southeastern Oregon. I drive through rain, and higher up, through snow, but when I reach the gorge, sunlight breaks through. I follow the old highway from Mosier up to the Rowena Plateau, where every spring the grasslands turn blue and gold with lupine and balsamroot.
From here, I can see the green forests of the Pacific Northwest and the arid browns of Eastern Oregon — the Rowena Plateau, a perfect transition zone. Looking down at the Columbia's banks, I imagine plankhouses, fishing canoes, nets, spears, salmon on stakes, and foragers returning with baskets of mountain berries.
Just upriver, at Celilo Falls and The Dalles, was the greatest trading center in the Northwest, a place William Clark called "the great mart of all this country." For thousands of years, people came from the coast, the Plateau and the Great Basin to trade dried salmon, shells, furs and stone, until The Dalles Dam drowned the falls in 1957, though Celilo Village endures, and Yakama, Umatilla, Warm Springs and Nez Perce fishers still work the river under their treaty rights. Obsidian from the high desert of central Oregon, from quarries like Glass Buttes, turns up in sites along the river. To learn whether the Chinookan people might connect to my stone tool's story, I'd have to understand their technology, their civilization's success, and whether those trade routes reached the people of the Owyhee.
And that’s why tomorrow I’ll head north to Washington to find out.
Blooming lupines on Mount Hood, Oregon
The Web and the Road
When the web first took shape, we imagined it as a tool to democratize information — to make journalism and knowledge more accessible, accurate, and transparent.
But something about this brave new information age — hoax emails, news crafted for specific subcultures, incendiary blog journalism — has, in some ways, made information less informative. For me, traveling and recording what I actually see is the antidote to that flood of secondhand information. Instead of reading about the world, I can witness it myself, ask questions, and observe with my own eyes.
Is that process fruitless? When I began searching for the origins of this stone tool three years ago, I knew the work had to happen through travel — not through books, libraries, or computers. I could probably find the answer in a book, but Carl Sagan is often quoted: "When you make the finding yourself — even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light — you'll never forget it." To see the light, you step out the door and go your own way.
Grasses in the hills beyond The Dalles, seen from the Columbia Hills in Washington.
Fog at the Plankhouse
Early morning brings hail and snow as I haul north on I-5 into Washington. I'm to meet Troy, a Washington native, at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge. He had called me a few days ago, making sure I'd meet him at the Cathlapotle Plankhouse, a reconstruction of a Chinookan plankhouse.
The refuge is shrouded in fog. No ceremony seems imminent at the plankhouse, so I walk the trail for a while. I know these paths well; Jane and I brought our son here several times in his first year. We gathered acorns, and like the Indians who lived among these oaks, we dried them and offered them to guests.
My phone rings. Troy won't be joining me — gallstones, he says. He gives me the names of a few people I could meet instead.
Hours later, I smell woodsmoke and hear distant chatter. When I return to the plankhouse, the foggy pondside hilltop glows with movement; tribes from as far away as Neah Bay have gathered here.
You enter the plankhouse through a round hole at its base. Without Troy, I step inside and am immediately lost in a world of families, relatives, and old intertribal friends.
Oneonta Gorge in the Columbia River Gorge area.
I watch the plankhouse fill with tribes from across the Pacific Northwest. Makah representatives from faraway Neah Bay begin to chant and drum, and the room quiets.
The Oregon Testament
After years studying Oregon's Native history, it's refreshing to spend a day with the Columbia's living Native cultures. I'm not Native American, nor was I ever drawn to romanticized views of Native history.
But the idea of the Oregon Testament — to experience the Native story of this land through travel — has always mattered to me. I grew up a first-generation American, my heritage Norwegian and German. My family made that heritage a priority; I felt both Minnesotan and European. When I moved to California, I was ambivalent about my new home — until I realized that even gray Los Angeles had a vibrant, layered history of its own.
Common Yellowthroat in the reeds, Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge, Washington.
Culture thrives when its people balance the traditions of history with the dynamism of progress. As a new arrival to Oregon, I owe something to my home — to absorb its history. There are many ways to do this: the state's museums, its books, its storytellers. But there's no formula for culture. The idea is that when you step into a new place, you bring your own story — and embrace its story too.
At the plankhouse, a man stands to speak. He talks about the power of community and the successes of the tribes. Then he announces a plan: his tribe will begin work on an authentic Columbia fishing canoe. The expertise of dozens will come together, and if all goes well, they'll launch the canoe next year.
It's inspiring to see these communities keeping their traditions alive. But I find myself thinking again about the origins of those traditions — and especially the water culture of Oregon's Native peoples. Soon I'll be boarding a plane to learn more.