Photograph shows waterfalls at the Kettle Falls portion of the Columbia River in Washington state. British Northwest Boundary Commission, 1859-1861.

The Kettle Falls were located on the upper Columbia River about 40 miles south of the Canadian border, and was once one of the most important fishing and gathering places for Native Americans in the Northwest. The sound of the river, plunging nearly 50 feet in a series of cascades, could be heard for miles. It was said that the salmon ran so thick there that it was impossible to throw a stick into the water without hitting a fish. All this came to an end in 1941, with the completion of Grand Coulee Dam, located about 100 miles downstream. The dam, built without a passage for fish, closed the upper Columbia and its tributaries to migrating salmon. Today, the noise at Kettle Falls comes not from rushing water but from nearby Highway 395. The falls themselves were lost to below the surface of a reservoir called Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake, only to be partially revealed occasionally when the water level is lowered before the spring thaw of this once picturesque and grand natural wonder.

From the U.S. Library of Congress.