9

Floods, Lakes, and Earthquakes

VOLCANOES PROVIDE THE EASIEST natural phenomenon to link to tribal traditions because they are not difficult to date in the geological strata, although we have seen that the potassium-argon method of dating leaves much to be desired. Nevertheless, volcanic strata are beneath or above other strata that give us some sense of historical sequence. Matching traditions about floods and the creation of lakes, rivers, and inland seas is somewhat more difficult, since water is an erosive force that can wipe out otherwise useful signs of age.

Written material suggesting an Indian knowledge of lakes and rivers has been radically transformed by people who were interested in oblique topics not directly related to the question of Indian knowledge. Almost all of the stories about lakes bring with them the romantic story of Indian maidens pining for lost or forbidden lovers. Flood stories are almost always linked with the concerns of fundamentalist Christians who believe that Indian accounts of a great flood will provide additional proof of the accuracy of the Old Testament. With their cultural blinders in place, it never occurs to them that the Old Testament may very well provide evidence of the basic accuracy of the Indian story.

Scholars in comparative religion, anthropology, psychology, and folklore usually steer well clear of using flood stories for anything except demonstrating that all societies have these kinds of traditions. The most common superficial explanation is that flood stories respond to a basic human psychological need and are therefore a part of the orientation process that societies devise to enable them to live in this world. But these flood stories almost always have geographical references to mountains where there are high­water marks and to locations where people lived prior to the flood. And they are stories that often provide a historic framework into which other experiences from the past are placed. The obvious question that presents itself is whether these flood stories do speak of a planetary event not so long ago involving significant psychological trauma that caused the event to be remembered.

Surveying the Indian memories of volcanoes and floods, one can immediately see that the short-term duration of volcanic eruptions leads the people to interpret the eruption as the work of a spirit, generally of the mountain, or of a number of spirits, depending upon the scope of the violence—one variant of the Three Sisters suggests that the mountain spirit of Multnomah had three wives who got out of hand; the Crater Lake story involves two mountains and two powerful spirits. Surprisingly, many flood stories include volcanic eruptions as part of the scenario, so that the stories suggest physical disruptions on a substantial geographical scale.

The pervasive nature of the large floods, the wide geographical scope of their damage, and the seemingly complete destruction of the world as people have known it lead many tribes to remember the experience as a general purging of evil in the world. The tribal accounts therefore need to be “demythologized,” not in the old Rudolf Bultmannian search for enduring religious truths, but simply to eliminate the idea of crime and punishment so as to allow a concentration on the physical phenomenon of an unusually spectacular and destructive flood event.

Let us begin our examination of Indian flood stories with the traditions of the Indians on the Pacific Northwest coast. These groups are basically seafaring peoples who used the sea as the Plains tribes used the land. With a complex set of triangulation devices, these tribes—Quinaults, Makahs, Clallams, and others—went far out to sea, hunting whales and seals. Therefore, over time, they experienced the terror of the sea as well as enjoyed its more placid benefits. If any groups knew and understood tsunamis and other hazardous ocean activities, these would be the people.

Their flood stories, for the most part, involve tsunami actions of unusual strength and duration. Mount Shasta legends say that the sea came inland and rose until it nearly covered this peak and then finally receded, leaving behind dry land and the marshes of the northern part of the state and southern Oregon. Strangely, no flood stories were collected by Ella Clark from the Oregon tribes, and my suspicion is that these tribes may not have survived the flood, or may not have been affected by it. If there are traditions among these groups regarding a flood coming from the west characterized by rising tides, then they are yet to be recorded.

When we reach Washington State we discover that hardly an Indian group exists that does not have a flood story, almost unanimously involving the sea invading the land. The people’s solution, having been forewarned, is to build canoes, sometimes rafts, and attempt to ride out the storm. In a number of stories only the good people in the canoe are saved. The majority of these stories appear to involve the efforts of the Indians to survive by fixing their canoes to the tops of mountains. They then identify landmarks and peculiar geological formations on the mountains as the site where the canoes were tied.

More often, however, this flood separates the different canoes and the tribe is scattered over a vast area before the water ebbs, leaving the people isolated from each other. The Skokomish, for example, scattered so widely that one group traveled far to the east and became the Flatheads, which are today a combination of Salish and Kootenai people. ‘’A long time afterward,” as an elder told Ella Clark, “when there was war around where Seattle is now, the Skokomish people were trapped on the bay. They heard strange people talking in the Skokomish language.

When my people spoke to them, they said, ‘We are the people who drifted away from here.’ That is why the Skokomish and the Flatheads speak the same language.’’1 The Quillayutes say:

For four days the water continued to rise. At last it covered even the tops of the mountains. The boats were carried this way and that way by the wind and the waves. The people could not guide them, for there was no sun and there was no land. Then the water began to go down. For four days it receded. By that time the people were scattered. Some of the canoes landed along the Hoh River. So those people have lived there ever since. Others landed at Chemakum, on the other side of the mountains. They have lived there ever since. Only a few found their way back to the Quillayute river.2

This story closely parallels a flood story of the Makahs who live on Cape Flattery. Toe tradition is cited in the earliest study of this tribe by James Swan, a schoolteacher and doctor for the tribe who was appointed immediately after the Makahs signed the 1855 treaty of Neah Bay with Isaac Stevens. Swan was able to verify parts of this tradition by examining the prairies near Neah Bay to confirm that the sea had indeed invaded the cape in a major happening. Although it resembles the Quillayute tradition, the story is worth repeating:

A long time ago, but not at a very remote period, the water of the Pacific flowed through what is now the swamp and prairie between Waatch village and Neah Bay, making an island of Cape Flattery. The water suddenly receded, leaving Neah Bay perfectly dry. It was four days reaching its lowest ebb, and then rose again without any waves or breakers, till it had submerged the Cape, and in fact the whole country, excepting the tops of the mountains at Clyoquot. The water on its rise became very warm, and as it came up to the houses, those who had canoes put their effects into them, and floated off with the current which set very strongly to the north. Some drifted one way, some another; and when the waters assumed their accustomed level, a portion of the tribe found themselves beyond Nootka, where their descendants now reside. …3

The Makahs and the Nootkas, therefore, are basically the same people, separated some time in the past by a monstrous tidal wave. The warm water mentioned in this story suggests that some kind of oceanic volcanic disturbance was involved, although there is a chance that an unusually strong version of the Japanese current may have been responsible.

Matching the various Indian descriptions of this tidal wave along the upper Washington coast is not difficult if the locations of the tribes are taken into account. The coastal tribes, such as the Makah, describe a rather steady and persistent rise of the water, enough so that the people could get prepared for the inundation. Some accounts that have been given to me orally indicate that the water first went out to sea, was gone for four days, and then came back in a rush. Since the Swan version is earlier, I suggest that description should take precedence.

When we examine the accounts of tribes in the inland sound area, such as the Clallams, Squamish, and Swinomish, the flood waters are described as if they had developed an increased velocity. It would seem likely that as the tidal wave reached the narrow channels in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and later as its waters hit the San Juan islands, the velocity of the wave would have increased significantly, producing a different physical description altogether. I would argue that we are talking about one event seen and experienced from several perspectives. But what kind of tsunami would create a wave so tremendous that it would submerge the peaks on the Olympic Peninsula and continue on to reach the snow line at Mount Baker and other peaks far inland?

The steady swell of the rising waters on the beach at Cape Flattery seems to me to raise doubts about this event, providing evidence of a planetary disaster such as the one required to create the Ice Age. Any extraterrestrial source approaching our planet would create havoc of unimagined dimensions and the waves would be far more spectacular. The best we can suggest from these accounts is a very major kind of activity in the Pacific Ocean basin.

These flood stories that involve tidal waves must be distinguished from flood stories that have rain as their primary source of water. Tribes all over the country have flood stories that feature incessant rain as the source of the disorder, and these stories, if any Indian stories, may have some relationship to Noah’s flood. Otis Halfmoon, a Nez Perce elder, told Ella Clark that “it rained for a long, long time. The valleys were filled with water, and the animals lived on the tops of the hills. Some of the animals were saved, but the big animals perished. That is why people have found the bones of big animals along the Salmon River and big hip bones near Lewiston.”4 This tradition fits comfortably with the argument earlier in the book concerning the demise of a major portion of the megafauna at the time of the large ice/water dump.

The rain scenario is also found on the Pacific coast, although having lived in that area, I cannot help but imagine that, if these Indians remembered a specific rain distinguishable from all others, they were talking about a pretty big event. My memories of the region are that it began raining January 1 and continued until December 31 with barely a break in June to glimpse the sun briefly. The Skokomish relate that the Great Spirit was displeased with the evil in the world and after having secluded the good people and animals, “ ... he caused a heavy rain to fall. It rained and rained and rained for many days and many nights. All the earth was under water. The water rose higher and higher on the sides of Takhoma [Mount Rainier].”5 The water did not subside until it had reached the snow line, so we may be talking about a substantial amount of rain. But we must remember that Mount Rainier was also actively shifting its location, or having the location changed for it, so that it may not have been anywhere near as tall then as it is today.

The Quillayute Indians who live on the Olympic Peninsula have a tradition which fits perfectly with the icy comet scenario. They experienced a storm of vicious intensity and prolonged duration. According to their tradition: “For days and days great storms blew. Rain and hail and then sleet and snow came down upon the land.

The hailstones were so large that many people were killed. The other Quillayute were driven from their coast villages to the great prairie, which was the highest part of their land.”6 The storm lasted so long that the people grew thin and weak from hunger, and it was so intense that the men could not go out on the sea to fish. Since these people always had a ready supply of food in this area, the long duration of the storm seems to suggest that we are dealing with a major climatic event. I would date this storm of rain, hail, sleet, and snow as preceding the tidal flood which divided this tribe into smaller scattered groups.

The lake and river flood stories are much easier to date, and demonstrate, in a manner reminiscent of the volcano stories, the possible historical basis of the tribal traditions. The most prominent tradition involves the Nez Perce, the Yakimas, and the Spokanes and involves the eastern Washington scablands flood which scoured out the Columbia Valley when giant Pleistocene Lake Missoula broke and emptied. Theoretically, this outburst was the largest such event in planetary history, although a Russian geologist has recently claimed that an even greater flood of approximately the same geological time period occurred in Siberia. Identifying two monstrous floods in these northern regions means that the glaciers must have melted at an unreasonably rapid rate, thereby lending some credibility and support to Donald Patten’s scenario.

Identifying the area and nature of the Washington scablands event (or events) is a story in itself. J. Harlan Bretz, a local scholar intensely interested in the scablands, began to investigate this landscape in the 1930s and quickly concluded that it was the scene of an impossibly large flood. The scablands is a vast area southwest of Spokane along the Columbia River, featuring dry river channels, massive waterfalls, and thousands of sand bars with some major dry pools and sinkholes, indicating that the landscape was carved by an almost unbelievable amount of water rushing at an enormous speed. The scablands region, according to Bretz, had suffered possibly two major floods beginning around 10,000 B.C.

The water had run from the Spokane area across to the Grand Coulee, then south down the main channel of the Columbia, with backwash areas east and west of the Columbia channel, then down the present Columbia, backwashed into the Willamette Valley, and finally pushed through to the Pacific Ocean. Even to imagine an event of this magnitude in the 1930s was to incur the wrath and disdain of everyone in the scientific community, for doctrine had decreed that no catastrophic events had ever occurred or would ever occur.

The respected giants of geological orthodoxy bitterly attacked Bretz’s ideas, and for most of his life he was ridiculed and ostracized by his profession for suggesting the possibility of a catastrophe of this scale. Bretz continued to advocate the theory and to publish additional papers elaborating on the idea. When he was in his early nineties a group of geologists finally gave the idea some credence, came to eastern Washington, and walked some of the terrain as Bretz had asked them to do for decades. He got an apologetic telegram from the group at his home following the tour, declaring that the geologists were now all catastrophists.

With the Bretz theory established, the next generation of geologists felt safe to speculate on the nature of the disaster. And many younger scholars, now able to work in catastrophic theory because it had become orthodoxy, began publishing papers on their version of the scablands geological history. At the present time, as many as forty different floods have been suggested, demonstrating that scholars can frequently get out of hand, given a novel idea to contemplate.

John Allen, Marjorie Burns, and Samuel Sargent, friends and colleagues of Bretz, summarized the present state of scablands flood literature in a delightful book, Cataclysms on the Columbia, in which they discuss the trials of Bretz in getting the idea a hearing, his eventual triumph, and the consensus scientific beliefs about the events. Their preferred date for scablands activities is between 15,000 and 12,800 years ago, and they seem inclined to accept a much larger number of floods, indicating a gradual melting of the ice sheets, taking away much violence from the initial outburst and distributing it over 2,000 years and the forty floodings.

The present scenario conceives of the Cordilleran ice sheet with a lobe penetrating the Purcell Trench in British Columbia and holding back billions of acre-feet of melted glacial water. This lobe then begins “advancing and retreating” between Pend Oreille Lake and the Clark Fork River. “Each time it advanced up the Clark Fork several miles it formed an ice dam as much as 2,500 feet high across the valley impounding the waters behind the dam to form a great lake up to 2,000 feet deep, covering 3,000 square miles, and extending for 200 miles to the east in the intermontane valleys within the Rocky Mountains.”7

The authors designate this area as “Lake Missoula’’ and they estimate it was nearly one-half the volume of our present Lake Michigan. Allen, Burns, and Sargent paint an idyllic picture of the plains of eastern Washington just prior to the bursting of the Lake Missoula ice dam:

Wooly mammoth and mastodon, longhorn bison, camel, caribou, and musk ox roamed the plains. Close behind, and preying on these herbivores, came the hunters, wolves in packs or lone saber-toothed tigers hunting by stealth. Giant condors soared across the skies, in search of carrion left by the hunters; and along the tributaries to the main rivers, giant beavers built dams, while shaggy, short-faced bears vied with early humans for the abundant salmon that swarmed up the Columbia and its side streams to spawn in the shallows.8

With this peaceful scene established we must at least recognize that the scablands floods, not mischievous Paleo-Indians, were responsible for the loss of megafauna in this region. But were there any Indians present at the time of the flood?

Bretz did not believe that Indians were around during the first flooding, and the only evidence we have that he believed that Indians were around for any of the flooding is simply this comment by his friends and disciples: “The only direct evidence in favor of Early Arrivers in the region of the Bretz floods,” Allen, Burns, and Sargent suggest, “is a campsite with charred bones and stone artifacts buried under pre-flood deposits at the site of the Dalles Dam and a single stone artifact recovered from a Bretz Flood gravel bar at the mouth of the John Day River.”9

The problem here is that if you have Paleo-Indians coming across the Bering Strait 12,000 years ago, you have to move them very quickly across the Alaskan mountains, down the so-called ice corridor to approximately Montana, and have them do an abrupt right-hand turn south of the glacial sheet and head directly across Idaho to the central Washington area. The odds of this kind of travel are minimal to impossible. Unfortunately, Allen, Burns, and Sargent simply lapse into familiar anthropological doctrine at this point, stating:

In the Old World there were human and human-like remains going back in older succession through the essentially human Cro-Magnon, the less human Neanderthal Man, the even less human Homo Erectus. ... 10

And so forth, repeating the outmoded sequence of alleged human evolution. And they follow the party line in suggesting that” ... the transit of the two continents may have taken only a few hundred years—along with the extinction of the elephants, mastodons, camels, and most of the other large game animals of the New World.”11 At the rate “scientists” are reducing the time required to have extinguished the megafauna, we will soon be told that a single Paleo-Indian glared across the Bering Strait and thirty-one species of megafauna fell over dead.

Derek Ager suggested that Amerindians had probably arrived in the area sometime before the flood because the “Marmes Rockshelter, near the spectacular Pelouse Falls in Washington, has yielded human bones and human artifacts. Probably many of these early people perished in the flood.”12 It is not difficult to see that admitting the presence of humans prior to the flood will involve serious scholarly disputes about the age of any sites located within the area which are beneath flood deposits. These sites would probably not be acceptable to the anthropologists and archaeologists who are wedded to the Bering Strait theory. Allen, Burns, and Sargent, however, are all optimistic about finding evidence of Indians in the future in this area.

At any rate, let us deal with the first flood and its intensity and then see what the Indian traditions relate. Allen, Burns, and Sargent describe the event in unforgettable language:

The mass of compressed air—impelled by the towering head of onrush­ing water-hit first. We know about winds building over time into hurricane strength, but how can we imagine a torrent of air exploding into existence, driven by a wall of water hundreds of feet high and moving at 50 miles per hour? ... think of these shock waves as emanating from the face of one plunging, thundering, rolling-water-wall, moving at speeds only slightly less than that of a car on a freeway, a swollen, surging mass composed of ice, rock, mud, and water, and standing over 500 feet tall for the first mile of its discharge, and again this tall where the waters were compressed and funneled by constricting features such as the Wallula Gap and the Columbia River Gorge.13

The flood, then, if one survived, was really something to tell one’s grandchildren about. Allen, Burns, and Sargent estimate that “the maximum flow was more than 9.5 cubic miles of water per hour, which could have drained the lake in two days. More probably it slowed and lasted for a week or more.”14

Many tribes have traditions concerning a great inland flood, and a significant number of people believe it was the Spokane scablands disaster. We should perhaps begin the Indian accounts with a tradition of the Spokane tribe. The Spokane Indians lived in the area north and northwest of the present city of Spokane, Washington, and I have located at least two versions of their flood tradition that relate to this particular flood. Ella Clark’s version is found in her Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest, and Deward Walker’s much shorter account comes from Alex Sherwood, who for many years was chairman of the tribe. We will look at Walker’s version first, and then Clark’s account will be used to expand our scope of discussion.

Many years ago the Spokane area was a large lake which took several days to cross. There were many villages around the lake and on the vari­ous islands of the lake. … One bright morning tragedy struck. The earth started rumbling and shaking. The startled Indians fled before the waters as huge waves pitched into the air, overturning boats and engulfing villages. The game drowned as they tried to escape to higher ground. Many died of starvation and thirst. Mount Spokane, the little Mountain that grew big overnight, gathered some to her care. Then the earth sucked the whole lake into the “World Below.” The lake was gone.15

Mount Spokane, it appears, had originally been an island in this gigantic lake. As the water drained to a lower level it seemed to the Spokanes observing the event as if the mountain was in the process of growing out of the ground.

Ella Clark’s version of the tradition was told by Chief Lot of the Spokanes to an army officer on the Spokane Reservation around 1890, a few years before J. Harlan Bretz was born, thus eliminating the idea that the Spokanes might have heard it from him. This version contains a bit more information, which helps illuminate the scope of the story for us. Chief Lot reported that the original lake was many days’ travel long, indicating that it must have extended well into Idaho and perhaps even into Montana. The disaster began with an earthquake that agitated the waters of the lake considerably. After the water rose to become an awesome set of waves beating relentlessly on the shores:

Then the sun was blotted out, and darkness covered the land and the water. Terrified, the people ran to the hills to get away from the pounding water. For two days the earth rumbled and quaked. Then a rain of ashes began to fall. It fell for weeks. … At last the ashes stopped falling, the waters of the lake became quiet, and the Indians came down from the hills. But soon the lake began to disappear. Dry land rose where the water had been.16

The longer version of the story suggests that an earthquake, or quite possibly volcanic rumblings indicating a rise of the magma to potentially dangerous levels, was the first sign of danger. The possibility exists that a tremendous volcanic eruption in some other part of the Pacific Northwest is associated with this emptying of the great Pleistocene lake, since in Chief Lot’s version, ashes fall for weeks and the scene calms down before the lake begins draining. It is not difficult to see that Alex Sherwood’s version picks up precisely at the point where Chief Lot’s concludes, the difference being one of emphasis by the two Indians.

In Clark’s version the people eventually follow the river to the west until they find a waterfall, perhaps the Grand Coulee or maybe one of the other fossil waterfalls which we see today. When they see salmon coming upstream in the new river channel, they realize the catastrophe has passed and they settle along the new river. It is difficult to imagine the magnitude of the flood in order to hypothesize when the river system would again be ready for salmon migrations. Certainly there would be many years of turbulent mud deposits and total ruin of spawning habitats. But the salmon, safe in the Pacific Ocean as part of their life cycle, would not have been destroyed and would have returned, as best they could, to areas which represented or resembled their original home.

Chief Lot’s account contains sufficient data so that we can question the orthodox interpretation of the glacier “advancing and retreating,” creating a series of ice dams, and engaging in sporadic floods over a long period of time. By collapsing the time frame in which the scablands floods occur to this one major event lasting several weeks, we can link the Indian traditions to the scablands floods and not become involved with the prolonged period of time (2,000 years and perhaps some seventy floods) required by uniformitarian interpretations.17

Many arguments can be made on behalf of the Spokane version of the flood. First, if these floods were periodic, Mount Spokane would not have appeared to have suddenly grown out of the ground. Rather, the Indian tradition would involve a story in which the spirit of the mountain spent his (or her) time traveling back and forth between our world and the “World Below,” struggling with a monster that was inhibiting his growth. The fact that Mount Spokane did not become the subject of continuing stories about rising and falling argues in favor of one large flood and the permanent draining of the lake.

Second, the Spokane tale clearly marks this event as being triggered by severe volcanic eruptions and provides a time frame, the several weeks of falling ashes, before the dam breaks and the lake drains. If the lake was as large as the Indian accounts suggest, that it took many days to travel the length of it, then the waters were impounded by solid rock and not a tenuous ice lobe that itself might have been melting in rapid fashion. So it would take a major earthquake and/or volcanic eruption to break through the solid rock walls of the lake, or tilt the land significantly, to open a passageway to the west and initiate the massive flood.

Third, and simply common sense, if there were as many as forty floods we should then have forty advances of the Clark Fork lobe of the glacier and thirty-nine retreats. In order to have this kind of activity we need periodically to warm and cool thousands of square miles of glacier located due north of Spokane Lake. That would mean, over a period of some 2,000 years, a warming and cooling every thirty years—a feat possible only in the minds of scholars. But this advancing and retreating scenario is ridiculous even in scientific terms. C. Warren Hunt examined the proposition of having an ice lobe act as a ditch gauge, releasing and impounding water to provide for the many floods that modern geologists now want. Pointing out that modern engineering techniques require considerable bedrock to secure the footings of dams to fill a space as small as five hundred feet, he implied that it was ridiculous “to suggest that chance emplacement of glacial ice might have dammed Clark Fork across a 7-mile ... span lacking in intermediate abutments and then retained water at four times the pressure of modern engineered, concrete dams!”18

Again we are dealing with casual, almost flippant, scholarly speculation passed off as reasoned discourse when we accept the idea that a multitude of floods occurred and were caused by glacial lobes sporadically creating dams, which strangely were much stronger than engineered modern dams.

We have little written testimony of the traditions of the Indians living downstream of the Spokane area on the Columbia River. The vast majority of them must have been obliterated with the first major flood. Ella Clark has a very short entry regarding the flood from the perspective of the downstream people: “Steptoe Butte stood above the waters at the time of the great flood, and many Indians there were saved from drowning. Below the top, there used to be a water line, the mark of where the water had once been.”19

The Nez Perce called Steptoe “Ya-mas-tas” and said that they had survived the great flood on top of that mountain. It was sub­sequently called the “Holy Mountain.” Across the Columbia to the west, the Yakimas said that they had survived the flood in a big canoe, which eventually lodged on Toppenish Mountain. We cannot be certain that the Nez Perce flood was the same as the scablands flood, because there was a large flood on the Snake River moving westward at one time, and there is not sufficient identification of the event to distinguish a particular flood. Since Steptoe Butte is somewhat removed from the Snake River, it would seem reasonable that the Nez Perce flood story is the scablands event and that theywere talking about one of the backwater surges that were characteristic of that event.

Pleistocene Lake Missoula was a tremendously large body of water, and being located high in the Rocky Mountains meant that its arms extended quite a distance into the various valleys that mark the western side of this mountain chain. We could expect, therefore, some traditions that would describe some of the minor events in the life of this gigantic lake. The Flathead people (Salish and Kootenai) who live in the Flathead valley northwest of Missoula, Montana, have preserved a tradition that describes a powerful flood that created Flathead Lake. “The great water first came to the valley where Flathead Lake has remained to this day. The flood grew bigger and bigger, spreading over all the lower lands. Most of the people were drowned in the valleys, but others fled to the highest mountains. At last all the land was covered except the solitary peak where a few Indians had gone for refuge.”20

The people, rapidly being consumed by the waters, prevailed upon their chief to halt the flood and he futilely shot two arrows at the rising water. They simply floated away. His third arrow stuck in the ground but the water came up to the third feather before it crested. Then “gradually the water went down, the tops of the mountains appeared, then the hills, then the valleys. The water that remained became Flathead Lake.”21 The tradition has a ring of authenticity to it. It seems to me that two possibilities exist: (1) the Flathead flood is a local flood brought about by the formation of Lake Missoula; (2) a major landslide or ice-slide moves into an existing Lake Missoula and pushes the water south; the water then sloshes backward to the north again, draining Flathead Valley and leaving a certain amount of water and thus creating the lake.

Some interesting possibilities exist with the Flathead traditions because they have other stories about how the lake once drained to the north, opposite its present outlet. The story about the southern outlet involves a giant beaver, which may argue that it was earlier in time. A flood coming from the north, however, would assist in creating a southern outlet, deepening whatever then existed considerably and making the lake permanently drain to the south toward present-day Missoula.

Since Pleistocene Lake Missoula was supposed to have covered the present-day city of the same name, it would seem likely that the first flood story must take precedence chronologically and the story describing the southern drainage with the giant beaver must be the later event. We then have evidence that in the Missoula area the giant beavers survived the scablands flood and perished at a later date, a fate which does not correspond with stories of other tribes that all the giant animals were destroyed in the flood. So the subject is primed and ready for more precise scholars to examine.

The scablands flood presumably moved into and scoured out the valley of the Columbia River, and the assumption of the Bretz school of geologists is that the Columbia River predated the flood. A Yakima story entitled “How the Coyote Made the Indian Tribes” sheds some interesting light on the origin of the river. A giant beaver inhabited Lake Cle Elum on the eastern side of the Cascades. His name was Wishpoosh and he abused the people so that Coyote decided to help them.

Coyote and Wishpoosh got into a fight in Lake Cle Elum and caused an earthquake which made a large hole in the lake, and it began to drain. Wrestling with each other and refusing to give in, Coyote and Wishpoosh rolled down the eastern slope of the Cascades to Kittitas valley, where the waters made a great lake. The combat continued on, Coyote and Wishpoosh struggling with the waters rushing behind in their wake. They cut the channel for the Yakima River, created a second lake, and tore through Union Gap. The waters overflowed this path and formed another lake in the Walla Walla country. The fight then took an abrupt tum to the left and the Oregon-Washington border channel of the Columbia was made to the Pacific Ocean.22

The Yakima story is echoed in several other tribal traditions where only part of the sequence is mentioned; the Colville, Sanpoil, and Okanagon tribes all repeat parts of this story. We can, of course, minimally claim that the tradition verifies the existence of the giant beaver. But of more interest is the identification of the river channels and lakes that are created during this conflict. Some minor versions of the scablands flood stories emphasize the existence of lakes in the lower eastern Washington area that are destroyed as a result of the tidal wave from the north. There lakes could well have been produced in the tidal wave issuing from Cle Elum. Again we have a knowledge of ancient geological features that modern Indians would not or could not have known unless their traditions remembered them.

Although the stories about lakes and floods in other parts of the country are sparse, there is one tradition that bears our examination. Ella Clark includes a lake story from the Shoshone tradition that represents this puzzling aspect of the Indian accounts. It begins: “Long, long ago, the Big Horn Basin was a great sea.” Fish and animals, although not megafauna, lived on the shores of this sea and were too smart to be caught by the Indians, so the people were thin and hungry. “Suddenly the waters of the great inland sea began to lower. Down they went, the Indians following, until the water was so low that fish were piled on top of each other.” The people had their fill and even preserved some of the fish. Then “at last the great sea disappeared completely, but there was left behind a river that roared through a crack in the mountains.”23 A straightforward narrative with no supernaturals present.

We seem to have here the creation or origin of the Big Horn River. Although the full story has reference to prayers of the people who were starving and needed to catch fish, the real story line is simply that the lake emptied into a new river and the fish were caught. Now the question arises how the Shoshones knew that the Big Hom basin was once an inland sea. We can suggest that they found seashells or that a visible waterline existed hinting at the original state of the basin. But if such a waterline existed, wouldn’t we expect that it would be cited as evidence of the great flood and not be identified as a seashore? I suspect that the story provides evidence that Shoshone occupancy of this region goes back a long, long time.

The Pacific Northwest is the perfect area to match Indian traditions and geological knowledge because of its many unique geological features. Where else can we get rivers, scablands, volcanoes, lakes, and floods within a restricted area and all in such close proximity that some stories describe the relationships between volcanoes and rivers, lakes and earthquakes? It is the interlocking of geological phenomena that makes this kind of exploration possible. When we tum to other areas of the country we have a terrible time matching Indian traditions with geological features because an outstanding natural formation is almost always isolated and bears no relationship to anything else.

A good example is the tradition, shared by many tribes, of the Devils Tower or, as the Sioux call it, the Bear’s Lodge, in northeastern Wyoming. In this story three little girls were out picking flowers when they were pursued by three bears. They ran to the top of the nearest rock, which at that time was only a few feet above the ground. When the bears followed the girls up the rock, they appealed to the spirits for help, “ ... and the spirits caused the rock to grow. Higher and higher it rose.”24 When the bears left, the girls made a rope of their flowers and let themselves down.

Now everyone in their right mind knows that this story is devised to explain the peculiarities of the Bear’s Lodge geological formation. Nevertheless, there is a curiosity here. If you have ever been to the Devils Tower, you will see fluted columns of volcanic material composing the giant structure and will be told by the Park Service guide that you are seeing a volcanic plug from which the surrounding strata have been eroded.

The curious thing about Devils Tower is that the rock appears to be badly eroded about a quarter of the way down and the remainder of the structure seems to have rock of a much cleaner and fresher look. It does look like the greater percentage of the rock has recently been pushed upward and that the original top part had been subjected to erosion for a considerable period of time. There are numerous volcanic cones southeast of Devils Tower, so some correlation could be made between the two sites. But it has always seemed to me that a small part of the tribal traditions, that the rock suddenly was raised straight out of the ground to new heights, may reflect some historical observation bylndians.

Probably more specific, and certainly more in tune with possible geological processes, is the tradition concerning the Badlands of South Dakota, one of the few earthquake traditions that we have among the Plains Indian nations. This area has in recent years received a decent amount of water, but in my youth it was a very stark landscape featuring a white clay formation that blinded you in the summertime. Originally, according to the Sioux, this area was a high fertile plain with fine grasses and trees. The Sioux enjoyed it as a hunting area, but one day they were invaded by a “fierce tribe from the mountains toward the setting sun .... “25 I suspect these invaders were Salish because their legends say they were more than a match for the three tribes of Dakotas and that they roamed far to the east in their hunting.

After suffering several severe defeats, the Sioux appealed to the spirits to help them. Their prayers were more than answered:

The midday sky became as black as a midnight sky. Lightning flashed, seeming to come from the ground, and thunder rolled. Strange fires lighted the entire country with their flames. The earth shook. Where the western tribe had their camp, waves of land like waves of a great water rolled baclc and forth.26

Finally, the fires burned themselves out, leaving the devastation that we today know as the Badlands. Some versions of this story include modern camp descriptions such as horses and tipis, but the basic story of the origin of the Badlands seems historical. The geology of the area makes it difficult to judge the age of this event. George W. Kingsbury, in his monumental work History of Dakota Territory, published in 1915, noted that:

It has been asserted by distinguished geologists that the basin of the Bad Lands is the ancient bed of a great coal field, the upper seam of which has been burned out by self-ignited fires, and the same layer underlies all the territory between the Missouri and the Yellowstone. In the early part of the last century the trappers and Indians told of the region of the Bad Lands being on fire, emitting an offensive smoke and the sound of rumbling thunder from the earth. These phenomena were mentioned by Lewis and Clark in 1805, and Hunt and McKenzie in 1811.27

Kingsbury also cited Charles Bates, who had surveyed the public lands in Dakota beginning in 1870. He in turn mentioned General Sully’s remark in 1864 when chasing the Sioux and encountering the North Dakota Badlands: “Hell with the fires out and still smoking.” Bates said the whole area was an extensive bed of lignite composed of vegetable materials extending from the Yellowstone River in eastern Montana clear across most of South Dakota and the lower half of North Dakota. “The smoke was caused from burning lignite beds, and some are still burning, or were when I was there twelve years ago,” Bates noted.28

The area in question is in the neighborhood of six hundred square miles, which is an incredible tract of land to be covered by a layer of coal that sometimes gets as thick as thirty-five feet. An unnamed geologist cited by Kingsbury stated that there were “... trunks of fallen trees with the stumps of the same, sixteen feet in diameter, standing where they grew, having been found there by General Harney, Lieutenant Warren, General Sully and Professor Hayden and others.”29

While attributing the perpetual fires to ad hoc lightning strikes is an acceptable explanation for the smoke, which can sometimes be seen today where the White River empties into the Missouri River, nevertheless the question arises why the land does not have as many smoking locations today as it ever did since virtually none of the areas has been exploited.

Two more recent Sioux traditions refer to this phenomena. On December 11, 1944, John Neihardt had one of his later interviews with Black Elk. The old medicine man told Neihardt that the White River was called Maka-izta, “Smoking Earth,” because there was a place there where smoke came out.30 The Sioux used to take their children to the place and tell them stories about when they lived in a land of volcanoes. The band carrying this tradition apparently did not know the story of the catastrophe in the Badlands. A Sioux elder, according to Ella E. Clark, recounted that Harney Peak, the highest mountain in the Black Hills, once issued columns of white smoke. “When my father was a young man,” he recalled, “the peak was on fire.”31

The Badlands represent a sizeable geographical area, which in its variety of fossil remains suggests a major catastrophe. If we simply enlarge the area and include the large animal burial grounds at the Agate Quarry on the Niobrara River in western Nebraska, we begin to see the scope of disaster that was once visited upon the northern Great Plains. A veritable cemetery of animals exists.

In fact the remains are so compacted and so spectacular that they are often cited in popular books, but the catastophic nature of these burials is rarely made clear. Richard Lull, in his book Fossils, wrote that “ ... the fossils are in such remarkable profusion in places as to form a veritable pavement of interlacing bones, very few of which are in their natural articulation with one another.’’32 And he quoted some absolutely incredible figures which illustrate the magnitude of the deposits. Citing a block (actually a slab) of rock with a surface measuring 5.5 by 8 feet which contained 4,356 bones, he wrote that the estimate of the number of animals in the whole formation was “Diceratherium—16,400 skeletons, Moropus—500, and Dinohyus at 100 animals.”33 Surely the northern Great Plains is an area ripe for systematic re-evaluation. Hopefully the Sioux traditions about the region will be seen as contributions that point the way for new research topics.

Although some Christian fundamentalists believe that floods testify to the accuracy of the Old Testament, it seems obvious that the close identification of Indian traditions with specific landmarks places them in a distinctly different category. Only the few stories involving intense periods of rain might have some correlation and the Klamath period of prolonged rain must certainly deal with the aftermath of the volcanic eruption. One major benefit of validating these traditions would be to establish the approximate time when certain tribes would have been occupying specific land areas. Linking the traditions of several tribes, such as we did in the Spokane flood story, enables us to see specific, if not spectacular, early events in North American geological history. Both scholars and disciplines have avoided cross-disciplinary correlation because of doctrinal considerations. Minimally, the recognition of the historical basis for some of these accounts can help amend the artificial boundaries of occupancy areas which the Indian Claims Commission and other federal agencies have forced on many tribes.

Admitting the veracity of Indian accounts would also enable us to sketch out a fruitful area for research in establishing a more specific history of North America that could take the place of the present speculative chronology of “primitive man’’ with its endless phases of hypothetical occupations based on a few different pottery styles and some chipping rocks. Since there is some basis now for reducing the number of possible phases of the Ice Age, the resolution of this question may help us escape the silliness of the rise and fall of land bridges and ice corridors and make sense of human occupation of this continent.