After the Party: Will the Celilo Canal Bring Prosperity?
With the massive Celilo Canal project complete, Kennewick editors question whether river commerce will become a reality or remain a political mirage.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Now that the hurrahs have died away and the brilliant events of Celilo celebration week have become memories, the canal and the open river are divorced from all sentiment and are with us as unadorned realities of everyday life. The United States put $5,000,000 into the canal. Is this expenditure to be justified or is it to be recorded as an extravagance? The history of the Celilo canal has been written in the minute books of commercial bodies, but its future will be recorded in the ledgers of the farmer and the merchant. It will be used just in proportion as it serves a dollars and cents interest to those who use it. If the management of the Dalles-Celilo line works upon the theory that their responsibility ends with the operation of the steamboats, their end will be that of their predecessors. The business is here and it is going to gravitate to the river exactly in the degree in which business methods are employed in handling it.
“The history of the Celilo canal has been written in the minute books of commercial bodies, but its future will be recorded in the ledgers of the farmer and the merchant.”
The Celilo Canal was intended to bypass dangerous rapids and open the Columbia to large-scale navigation, a major infrastructure gamble of the early 20th century. Today, these debates over 'public-private' transit investments mirror modern concerns about the economic viability of regional infrastructure projects and the transition from extractive industrial use of the river to recreational and ecological management.
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