The Columbia carries large amounts of silt as the result of its high volume and periodic nature of its flow — high in the spring and early summer, lower in the fall and winter — and this always has made navigation challenging. The first channel improvement project in the Columbia River Basin took place shortly after the Civil War, in 1866, when the U.S. Army Engineers cleared snags from the Willamette River. It was the Army’s first civil works project in the Pacific Northwest. 1866 also was the year the first load of wheat from the Palouse country of southeastern Washington was transported by boat down the Snake and Columbia rivers to Portland. Dredging in the estuary began in 1873.

Columbia River commercial navigation could be said to date to 1877, when Congress approved a channel from the Portland/Vancouver area to the mouth of the river. The same year, plans were completed for the Cascades Canal past the Cascades rapids 45 miles east of Portland. The proposal was for the Army Engineers to build a canal 7,200 feet long and 50 feet wide with two locks, each eight feet deep at low water by 70 feet wide and 300 feet long. Complicated land condemnation proceedings delayed the beginning of construction until November 1878. The canal was not completed until November 1896, as lack of funds, labor problems, engineering and construction difficulties and other unforeseen setbacks slowed the work.

The Cascade Locks and Canal allowed for the first time safe and continuous navigation through the treacherous falls of the Cascades. Previously, Steamboats usually only ran the Cascades during low water. At other times of the year the rapids were too dangerous. Still unfinished when opened, the Canal cost $3.7 million to that point, more than double the original estimate. On November 5, 1896, steamboats carried several hundred excursionists through the locks to view the work. The steamer Sarah Dixon fired cannon salutes at appropriate intervals.

The canal immediately benefited river commerce. Between 1898 and 1920, the value of freight through the canal exceeded the construction cost in most years. The locks and canal were used until 1938, when they were covered by the water behind Bonneville Dam. The dam included a lock for river traffic.

Sternwheelers were able to operate from Astoria and Portland upriver far as Celilo Falls, where goods had to be portaged, until a canal similar to the one built at Cascade Locks was completed. The U.S. Army Engineers completed the canal and locks around river obstructions between The Dalles and Celilo in 1915, opening river navigation between the ocean and Lewiston, Idaho, a distance of 465 miles. The Celilo Canal took nearly 12 years to construct. It was 65 feet wide, eight miles long and eight feet deep and had periodic turnouts to allow boats to pass each other (today it is under the water behind The Dalles Dam).

The opening of the Celilo canal was cause for celebration at Lewiston, Idaho, where citizens had advocated the canal as a means of linking the city to the ocean for the export of locally grown products, primarily grain. Sixty years later they would celebrate again when the last of four federal dams would be completed and the lower Snake would be open to deep-water barges.

May 15, 1915, was hailed by Celilo Canal proponents as “Lewiston’s Greatest Day” in honor of the completion of the canal; a celebration attracted 25,000 people to commemorate the “Open Road to the Sea.” One hundred guns saluted the sunrise and did so again at the sunset that day. There were many celebratory speeches, including one by Joseph N. Teal, an open-river booster, who noted: “The Inland Empire will be an empire in fact as well as in name — an empire of industry, of commerce, of manufacture and agriculture; and the valleys of the Columbia and Snake will have become one vast garden, full of happy homes and contented and industrious people.” Three years later, in 1918, the entrance channel of the Columbia River was dredged to a depth of 40 feet in order to allow larger vessels to enter the estuary.

Meanwhile, above the mouth of the Snake River, where the Columbia gradually narrows and becomes shallower and more hazardous to navigate, river navigation interests were at work as early as the 1860s. Steamboats constructed above Celilo Falls, notably at the mouth of Oregon’s Deschutes River, carried miners up the Snake and Clearwater rivers during the gold strikes of the 1860s. The landing at Wallula, near the mouths of the Snake and Walla Walla rivers, became an important transfer point in this era, as miners and settlers left the river boats and traveled into the interior by horse and stage coach.

As farms were established in the Big Bend country of central Washington, town promoters lobbied for railroad connections and riverboat service. A steamboat, the “City of Ellensburg,” successfully ascended Priest Rapids in 1888 and continued upriver to the mouth of the Okanogan River, proving that it could be done. By 1904 the area was well-settled and the Okanogan Steamboat Company was offering daily service between Wenatchee and Brewster. Business organizations continued to think big. In October 1910 the Open Rivers Committee of the Wenatchee Commercial Club proposed that river navigation and transportation should be extended in the upper Columbia River as far as the international border. Canadians endorsed the proposal and said navigation should be extended north across the border. The Nelson Daily News of Nelson, B.C., commented that year that Puget Sound was the nearest outlet to the ocean for the Columbia River Basin but that “…nature has thoughtlessly erected an almost impassable barrier to that outlet, namely the Cascade Mountains.” But the Columbia offered an alternative, “a natural and economical way to avoid that obstruction . . . a natural drainage of an empire to tide water.” It was time to do something about that, the newspaper commented, embracing the position of the Wenatchee organization: “The Columbia River is of international importance, and an organization embracing this country and British Columbia should be effected at once for the prosecution of such work.”

Over time, as the population of the interior Columbia River Basin grew, riverboats operated as far upriver as Death Rapids just north of the present-day city of Revelstoke, B.C., 1,000 miles inland from the ocean. By taking a succession of boats it was possible to travel or ship products from the upper Columbia to Vancouver, Portland and Astoria. The primary navigation aids in the upper river, unlike the dredged channel in the lower river, were steel rings secured in rocks so that the boat operators could tie up and line their vessels through the most dangerous rapids. Teams of horses were employed at places to help pull the boats through.