Willamette Falls has been a Native salmon and lamprey fishery for over eight thousand years.  This project’s study area is within the traditional homeland of the Clackamas Chinook, whose territory included the Willamette River upstream to the Tualatin River and downstream to about what is now the Port of Portland, including Willamette Falls, and extending east along the Clackamas River. West of the Clackamas were Tualatin and Ahantchuyuk Kalapuyans, and to the south were the Northern Molala. Willamette Falls was one of the region’s most productive fisheries, and the confluence of different cultural groups in the general area made the vicinity of the falls an important center of commerce.

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The Clackamas controlled the productive fishery at Willamette Falls and harvested salmon in great quantity, primarily in spring and summer.  Salmon fishing at the falls was restricted and “foreign groups got salmon at the falls through trade.” The Wasco, Multnomah, Yakama, Tualatin, and Molala tribes visited the village at the falls to trade for salmon and request fishing rights.  Lamprey were also harvested at the falls, and there is some indication that the lamprey fishery may have been open to visiting groups without restriction. 

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The Clackamas had strong economic and marriage ties to other Chinookan groups, especially those Columbia River groups upriver from the Portland Basin to The Dalles, as well as to their close Kalapuyan and Molala neighbors. Being at the center of a vast aboriginal trading network, the Chinookans easily entered into extensive trade relations with Euroamericans, especially following the establishment of Fort Vancouver by the Hudson’s Bay Company. It is estimated that the Clackamas and their immediate Chinookan neighbors, had a precontact (ca. 1770) population of about 12,000 which was reduced by disease to about 300 by 1855, a mortality of nearly 98% over just 85 years.

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With continued population decline, and unrelenting harassment and encroachment by American settlers on their homelands, the surviving Clackamas, Molala and Kalapuyans joined in a confederation of tribes, agreeing to a treaty in 1855 that ceded the Willamette Valley for promise of a permanent reservation, supplies and other support, and protection from the settlers. Western Oregon Indians were marched to the new Grand Ronde Agency in early 1856.  Even after their removal to Grand Ronde, many Clackamas continued to return to Willamette Falls to fish, maintaining a camp on the west bank into the 1870s.  Today the Grand Ronde, Yakima, Cowlitz and Warm Springs people still visit Willamette Falls to fish.