The Middlemen of the Columbia: Chinook Power and the River Trade
By Marcus Hale Whitfield
Length4h 24m
About this audiobook
For centuries, nothing went up or down the lower Columbia without passing the Chinook. Dentalium shell from the coast, obsidian from the Cascades, dried salmon, camas and captives, and later the sea otter pelts that Boston ships carried off to China all moved through the plank-house towns between the river's mouth and the falls at Celilo, and the Chinookan peoples who held that reach of river took their share of every exchange. Theirs was a crowded, ordered country, where families owned the right to fish a particular eddy or to sing the song that brought the salmon upriver, and women waded the tideflats at low water for wapato.
Robert Gray sailed in and named the river for his ship in 1792. Lewis and Clark wintered at its mouth in 1805, and Astor's traders built a post there in 1811; one of them married a daughter of the Chinook leader Comcomly. The Hudson's Bay Company made Fort Vancouver the capital of the river trade, and a fever in the early 1830s emptied whole towns. At Tansy Point in 1851, Chinookan leaders signed treaties ceding most of their land in return for small reservations, and the Senate never ratified them. Their descendants spent the next hundred and fifty years pressing the United States to honor what its agents had promised. Federal recognition finally came in 2001. It was withdrawn the following year.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length4 hrs 24 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 19, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: Where the River Becomes the Sea
2Chapter 2: Wapato and Salmon: The Estuary Larder
3Chapter 3: The Trade Road to Celilo
4Chapter 4: Cedar and Slaves: The Social Order
5Chapter 5: Boston Ships and Sea Otter
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6Chapter 6: The Bad Weather People
7Chapter 7: Astor's Gamble, McDougall's Ledger
8Chapter 8: Fort Vancouver and the Company River
9Chapter 9: The Missions, the Measles, and the Remnant Towns
10Chapter 10: Tansy Point, 1851
11Chapter 11: Unratified: The Long Century
12Chapter 12: The Petition in the Drawer
13About the Author
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