HRA recently completed for the National Park Service a history of the Columbia River from 1840 to 1870, the years that settlers traveling along the Oregon Trail poured into the Pacific Northwest. The harrowing journey along the river changed dramatically from 1840 to 1870, largely as a result of increased white settlement, development of alternative routes that avoided the river, and the forced removal of the Indigenous people who lived on the river and controlled passage across its two major portages, from Celilo Falls to the Dalles and at the Cascades of the Columbia. Learn more in HRA’s report, now available online: https://www.nps.gov/oreg/learn/historyculture/research.htm.