History Mystery for Oct. 19

Terray Harmon, Scott Randall  and, posthumously, Frederick “Fritz” Cramer contributed to this report.

Last week’s History Mystery, above, was scanned from a 4-inch by 5-inch black and white negative from a collection labeled “Wasco Island Trip.” It is dated “about 1947.”

Harmon and Randall both suggested the photograph showed the Oregon shore. Randall said it looked like the “roadcut” archaeological site excavated during the construction of Interstate 84 east of The Dalles.

In an interview by Pat Hanson, transcribed by Marilyn Misner and hosted at the Columbia Gorge Interpretive Center in Stevenson (www.columbiagorge.com), Fredrick “Fritz” Cramer recalls fishing on the island:

“Well my name is Frederick Cramer; mostly everybody knows me as Fritz Cramer. I was born in The Dalles, here, February 13, 1916, and I became interested in and knowledgeable about the fisheries here because my dad was a commercial fisherman, here on the Columbia River, and I fished with him in the summers from 1931 through 1937. We dip netted for salmon, at the fishwheel number three channel as well as over on Wasco Island and Memaloose Island; these are all in the Big Eddy area of The Dalles. This was a spring fishing location and a summer run fishing location for high water, and we also ran set gill nets in the eddies, in that area.”

He adds, “We fished at Big Eddy and we lived at fishwheel number three; we slept overnight there. We cooked our own meals. Pretty greasy cooking,you know. We ate a lot of salmon and shad roe, and sturgeon.

“We’d get up early in the morning and run the set nets; maybe around four-thirty (4:30 a.m.) in the morning. We run those set nets first and then after that, we’d come back and have breakfast; in those days we didn’t have an outboard motor, we’d just row our boats around up in there. We’d row over to Wasco Island, for example, where we’d row over to what we call number three channel, between Wasco Island and Memaloose Island, and sometimes we fished, also, right in the fish-way channel of number three fishwheel. Of course the wheel was not running then.”

What happened to Wasco Island?

In a thesis by David-Paul Brewster titled “As long as the mighty Columbia River flows,” there is a reference to to the island which reads, “returning to the river, Charley again asked, ‘Dr. F. A. Davidson, take a picture of the dam workers taking out Wasco Island.’”

Printed below are three additional photographs from the “Wasco Island Trip.”

— Mark Gibson

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