CULVER, Ore. – History can be dusty, musty and as cold and impersonal as a rock.
But try standing in front of the Crooked River Petroglyph Boulder at Cove Palisades State Park, armed with the knowledge that the images chipped into its surface are thousands of years old, and see if you can remain impassive, oblivious to the possibilities.
Bet you can’t.
Who left these enduring marks? He or she was almost certainly a Wasco, Warm Springs or Northern Paiute Indian who lived on this landscape of towering rimrock, shimmering sunlight and rivers glinting like ribbons far below.
What do these images depict? Was the artist absently doodling or reaching out to the future, certain the renderings would endure? Was the artist a hunter? A mother, a sister, a visionary?
No one knows for sure.
“It could be a recording of a major feast event as a record for the future generations,” according to Rudy Clements of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs.
Or it could be a sign of something less tangible.
“What we tend to forget about are the things that can’t be seen,” Clements said. “The principles behind the actions. The (petroglyph) is a reminder of those, the unseen behaviors in the soul. Most of us agree that (the petroglyph) is there to provide direction.”
And it was direction – the compass point kind – that led the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department and the Confederated Tribes to move and reorient the 15-ton boulder recently.
The story began as much as 8,000 years ago, when the artist took stone in hand and pecked the images into the boulder. The boulder was then a mile-and-a-half downstream on the west bank of the Crooked River.
There it sat for thousands of years until it was discovered and moved in 1963 before that reach of the river was flooded to create Lake Billy Chinook. It ended up on display midway between the Crooked River and Deschutes River arms of the lake.
The petroglyph boulder had been saved from the dam builders and was preserved in an outdoor exhibit that “looked like a 1970s roadside attraction,” said the parks district’s Paul Patton, who spearheaded a 10-year campaign to move the hefty artifact one more time. In the 1960s, the petroglyph boulder was surrounded by ornamental junipers and an information board. Facing west, the boulder was pummeled by more than 40 years’ worth of storms.
“The images had begun to degrade,” said Patton.
So, about a decade ago, Patton and his colleagues contacted tribal officials. They developed a partnership that involved archaeologists, cultural researchers and one very large crane.
The result is a display that’s remarkably faithful to the original placement and circumstances.
A team moved the boulder about 20 feet and spun it 90 degrees; it now faces south as it did in its original position downriver, explained parks district assistant site manager Bill Crawford. Patton and crew studied a photo of the boulder in its pre-1963 position, collected stones and placed them exactly where they belonged. The photo showed a rock that resembled a camel’s hump, and Patton found one. But what about a small, gray rock, smooth on top and sides but jagged and broken on one end? It’s there now too.
And there are the plants.
Gone is the nursery stock, replaced by native species: rabbitbrush, bunch grasses, quaking aspen, red-twig dog wood, Oregon grape and several others.
The path up to the petroglyph is studded with cast animal tracks. The cougar, coyote, mule deer and raccoon tracks are placed the way the animals would actually leave them, Crawford said.
“It gets the mind stirring,” said Patton.
The whole of it – the plants, the tracks, the small stones and the petroglyph itself conspires to create an environment conducive to living history.
With the clouds scudding past Ship Rock up the hill, a pair of vultures out over the lake, and a lizard sunning itself on the boulder’s summit, it’s easy to block out the nearby road and the guy in the uniform next to you.
And it’s not hard to picture that solitary American Indian, rock chisel in hand, etching dreams in stone.
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