A Mountain Fell Into the Columbia
Twin earthquakes rattle Oregon and the Yakima agency — and old settlers recall 1874, when sixty-four shocks tore a mountainside into the great river and buried Chief Wapato John's ranch.
The earthquake of last Tuesday morning, which passed along Oregon from Oswego and Portland to the Dalles, was followed by one on Tuesday which appears to have spent its force at the Yakima Indian agency. Three heavy shocks occurred, and the latter frightened the inhabitants, made the houses rock, and shook down a portion of the plastering in a new boarding house. It also wrenched the office sufficient to tear away the light wire fencing attached to the front. One woman was frightened into severe sickness.
The shaking up of the people of North Yakima last week reminds some of the old settlers of the terrible earthquake in the summer of 1874, when there were no less than sixty-four distinct shocks occurring at night in midsummer, and all along the upper Columbia could be heard the falling of rocks as mountains were torn down and hurled upon plain or into the river. Not since Washington has been known to white men has there been so great an earthquake within its confines, says the Yakima Herald. The indications of its destructiveness are still seen in great crevices, huge stone monuments of queer shape, and broken trails. A great mountain at Chief Wapato John's ranch, near the mouth of the Chelan river, was rocked into the Columbia, damming that huge stream, flooding the chief's ranch, carrying away his house, and forcing him to fly for his life. It was a number of days before the waters washed away a portion of the rocks and receded to anywhere near their original level. Chief John was so thoroughly scared that he never returned to his ranch.
“A great mountain at Chief Wapato John's ranch, near the mouth of the Chelan river, was rocked into the Columbia, damming that huge stream, flooding the chief's ranch, carrying away his house, and forcing him to fly for his life.”
Long before seismographs and Cascadia warnings, Washington settlers were already cataloguing the ground's temper — the 1874 shocks remain among the largest quakes ever recorded in the region. The image of a mountain sliding into the Columbia and damming it is a reminder that the Northwest's most dramatic geology is not a modern discovery. Olympia today plans for the next big one on the same restless ground.
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