01Summary
Falls and rapids on the Snake River near Hagerman, Idaho, where Shoshone fishermen speared salmon each summer and dried a year's supply. Oregon Trail emigrants traded here for fish. A few miles upstream, springs pour out of the canyon wall.
02History
Salmon Falls is a set of falls and rapids on the Snake River in the Hagerman Valley, with Upper and Lower Salmon Falls about five miles apart. Salmon swimming up from the Pacific crowded below the falls, and Native people fished here long before any traders came.
In August 1812 Robert Stuart's party, heading east from Astoria, found about 100 lodges of Shoshone people 'busily engaged killing and drying fish,' Washington Irving wrote in 'Astoria' in 1836. One man traveling with Stuart had seen several thousand salmon taken in a single afternoon. Each summer the fishermen dried enough to last the year.
From the 1840s the Shoshone also traded fish to Oregon Trail emigrants. Peter Burnett's party arrived on September 7, 1843, and paid 'one ball and one charge of powder for each dried fish.'
One man in the party had carried a three-pronged fish spear, called a gig, all the way from Missouri. He threw it again and again at the falls and missed every time. He came back, Burnett wrote, 'greatly mortified because the Indians could beat him in catching salmon.' Burnett admired the Shoshone spear, a long pole with a sharp buck-horn tip that went clear through the fish, slipped off the pole and held the fish by a cord of sinew.
A few miles upstream, water bursts out of the north wall of the canyon and tumbles into the river. It starts as rivers in the mountains to the north that sink into the desert and flow underground to this spot, now called Thousand Springs. The main wagon road ran past on the south side of the river.
'Over the edge of the black cliffs, and out from their faces, are falling numberless streams and springs,' John C. Frémont wrote in October 1843. At Salmon Falls he found 'one of those places the traveller turns again and again to fix in his memory.'
03Today
Idaho Power dams now stand at Upper and Lower Salmon Falls. Salmon from the ocean can no longer reach them, cut off by dams downstream that began with Swan Falls Dam in 1901. At the Oregon Trail Overlook in Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument, a short walk leads to deep wagon ruts above the river.
04People connected here
05Stops nearby
The Oregon Trail ran about 2,170 miles from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon City. The stops just before and after this one are below. You can also find Salmon Falls on the interactive map.