Writings on the River

Writings on the River. . , Petroglyphs , The earliest ‘writings’ along the Snake River were petroglyphs carved into the rocks. At the Buffalo Eddy and Captain John sites, located 20 miles upriver from here, some of the petroglyphs are four to six thousand years old. Many of the carvings depict hunting scenes with bighorn sheep, elk, and deer. The humans are stickman figures with spike-horned headdresses and triangular bodies with bows or hunting atlatls. , Fabulous Floods , This flood along Lewiston’s Maine Street in 1894 was nothing compared to floods of the past. Beginning about 17 million years ago, 40,000 cubic miles of basaltic lava flooded the Columbia basin. This was followed by waters bursting from a ruptured Lake Bonneville in northern Utah (approximately 15 million years ago). Gravels from that flood underlie much of Lewiston. When the ice dam holding back Lake Missoula failed, water shot forth at a rate 10 times the combined flow of all the rivers of the world. When the flood waters hit the narrows of Wallula Gap, about 100 miles west of here, the waters backed up clear to the Lewiston-Clarkston Valley. , The Writingest Explorers , The first English words written along the shores of the Snake River were composed on the night of October 10th, 1805. The men of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, who have been called the “Writingest Expedition,” were faithful journal-keepers. Besides the journals of Captains Lewis and Clark, all of the sergeants were required to keep diaries. Clark wrote from their campsite on the north side of the Snake River that he observed it was “worthey of remark that not one Stick of timber on the river near the forks and but a fiew trees for a great distance up the River we descended.” , Nothing to Imped Navigation , Lewiston’s first newspaper, The Golden Age, published an account in 1862 of an exploration up the Snake River. According to the story, the party of “three reliable men… started from Lewiston… and followed the meanderings of the Snake.” They made it to Fort Boise, then “came dashing, foaming down the wild, tortuous Snake.” The newspaper concluded that “They found nothing in the river to impede navigation.” This claim may be disputed by the generations of steamboat captains, jet boaters, and rafters who have followed.