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Wanapum Dam Brochure

1956 · Wanapum, WA

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Pages (3)

Cover
Cover
Inside spread
Inside spread
Back
Back

Background

The phrase "Under Construction by" — set in italic just above the publisher's name — places this brochure firmly in the construction years of the Priest Rapids Development, when Grant County PUD was raising two dams that would permanently alter the Columbia River home of the Wanapum people.

Grant County PUD, headquartered in Ephrata, Washington, received a Federal Power Commission license in November 1955 to build two dams at Priest Rapids on the mid-Columbia River in central Washington. Priest Rapids Dam broke ground in 1956; Wanapum Dam followed in 1959 and completed in 1963. Together the two projects cost roughly $93 million and made Grant PUD, by 1964, the third-largest non-federal producer of hydroelectric power in the United States.

The Wanapum — whose name means "river people" in the Sahaptin language — had inhabited this reach of the Columbia for centuries without ever signing a treaty with the U.S. government, leaving them with no federally recognized reservation and no formal land claims to assert against the project. Their principal village, P'ná, stood two miles downstream of where Priest Rapids Dam would rise. In January 1957, four Wanapum men signed an agreement with the PUD trading traditional land use for cash, lifetime housing, electricity, water, a longhouse, and employment — a settlement concluded before either dam was finished and the flooding that followed.

Approximately 60 Wanapum petroglyphs were blasted from rock faces before the reservoir filled. Some rescued carvings are now displayed at Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park, about 30 miles south of the dam site. Around 60 Wanapum still live near Priest Rapids today; the Wanapum Heritage Center opened in 2015 to preserve and display pre-inundation artifacts.

The cover reproduces what appears to be a bas-relief (a sculpture raised slightly from a flat background, typically cast in bronze or carved in stone) depicting a Wanapum elder — braided hair, hands raised — framed by a large circular disc bearing a crescent and star. These symbols likely reference the Wanapum's Washani spiritual tradition, a Columbia Plateau religion sometimes called the Dreamer faith, centered on ancestral connection to land and water. That the PUD chose this image for the cover of a dam-builder's promotional pamphlet was a deliberate gesture of acknowledgment toward the people whose home the reservoir would cover.

Researched with claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 on May 24, 2026. AI-assisted — verify before citing.

Highlights

  • The spaced-capital title "PRIEST RAPIDS DEVELOPMENT" runs across the upper portion in a period sans-serif typeface with wide letterspacing, a common mid-century institutional design convention.
  • "STORY OF THE WANAPUMS" appears as a secondary title below the main heading, framing the brochure explicitly as an account of the Indigenous people displaced by the dam project.
  • The central cover image reproduces a bas-relief depicting a Wanapum elder with braided hair and raised hands, against a circular disc — the artist and original medium are not credited.
  • A crescent moon and six-pointed star are visible within the circular halo behind the figure, symbols likely associated with the Washani (Dreamer) spiritual tradition of Columbia Plateau peoples.
  • "Under Construction by" appears in italic script — the only italic text on the cover — marking this as a pre-completion publication and narrowing the date window to 1956–1963.
  • "EPHRATA, WASH." identifies the PUD's seat of government — a small agricultural city in the Columbia Basin, about 30 miles northwest of the dam site.

Further reading