Published in 1933 by Clarence Orvel Bunnell, Legends of the Klickitats: A Klickitat Version of the Story of the Bridge of the Gods presents an adaptation of regional Native oral traditions concerning the great landslide and natural stone arch that once spanned the Columbia River Gorge. Written as a dramatic, quasi-mythological narrative, Bunnell frames the text as a faithful preservation of tribal lore passed down through the Klickitat people, detailing the titanic mythological battles of the creator spirit Tyee Sahale and the cataclysmic destruction of the land bridge. Rather than an academic transcription, the work is heavily stylized for a popular white readership, blending Euro-American literary conventions with romanticized Indigenous motifs to capture the dramatic antiquity of the Pacific Northwest landscape.

A keen insight drawn from the work is how the cultural appropriation of Indigenous oral tradition functioned to safely domesticate and re-conquer the landscape for the settler-colonial imagination. By filtering Native creation narratives through a heavily romanticized, melodramatic literary lens, Bunnell effectively stripped the local tribes of their living political sovereignty and contemporary existence, reducing them to legendary phantoms tethered exclusively to geological deep time. This historiographical and literary maneuver allowed white settlers to emotionally colonize the Columbia River Gorge; by absorbing local Indigenous mythology into the regional folklore of the American frontier, the settler state could claim a deep, quasi-spiritual ancestry in the territory while simultaneously erasing the actual, displaced descendants who continued to inhabit the landscape.

Klikitat Indians, Klikitat Indians Legends, Legends

How the Indians got their mouths Creation of the Bridge of the Gods How salmon were brought to the Columbia Why the bats must fly by night Fall of the Bridge of the Gods Koyoda called to clear the channel Indian maidens and chief turned to stone Koyoda punished by the Great Spirit

"Third edition."

"Third edition."