The Columbia River and its Celilo Falls, famous for some 10,000 years of fishing, is cut into the lava flows the has given Oregon it’s young and turbulent geology. The hallowed falls, which now lie beneath the subterfuge of calm waters that backed up behind The Dalles Dam in 1957, was the site of one amazing dip.
The Dalles Monica Wheeler was there, just a teenager. She saw it first-hand. And her father Robert L. Wheeler captured it on film. Another photographer did as well and turned the shot into Life Magazine. It earned a full page in the magazine in October of the same year.
Here is the story in Monica’s own words.
DAD'S FAMOUS PHOTO
Who was the most surprised? Was it the little Indian boy who fell into the chute at Celilo Falls, or the man who dipped him out thinking he had caught a large salmon?
It was Sept. 7th, 1952, Dad’s 42nd birthday. Our family often went for Sunday drives. On this warm autumn afternoon five years before the waters rose behind The Dalles Dam and flooded all that sacred place, we drove the 12 miles to Celilo Falls to hear the roaring water, to watch the Indians cross the falls in their perilous little boxes pulled across on a pulley and rope arrangement, and to dip their long-poled nets in the swift water to catch the great fish.
Dad’s camera was ready at the moment a fisherman, Archie Bushman of the Umatilla Tribe, responded to a jerk and pulled his net, which held a little 8-year-old boy. Danny Sampson, one of the many Indian children who were comfortable playing around the Falls, had fallen into the chute above the fishing platforms. He jumped out of the net and was last seen running toward his home in the village, bruised and shaken but alive.
A stranger standing next to him had borrowed Dad’s light meter. The following week there was a full-sized black and white photo of the incident in Life magazine, as Picture of the Week. The man had sent his entire camera, full of film, to the magazine!
Many years later Dad learned that Danny had grown up but died in a knifing incident on the Yakima Reservation.
SIDE NOTES:
Photographer Robert Wheeler owned Wheeler’s Communication Co. in The Dalles and was the first to install two-way radios on the tugboats running the river, said Gary Bloom, 65. Bloom went to work with Wheeler at age 20.
“He was full of energy,” he said. “I could hardly keep up with him. I considered him my mentor.”
Wheeler’s Communication was the official Motorola two-way radio center for the area. He had a large part in erecting repeater towers in the Columbia Hills just east of Dallesport, the site where many of our cell phone and television signals are still emitted.
Wheeler Communications sold to Day Wireless several years ago. Bloom is now a senior radio technician with the company.
“Oh yeah, he took my picture,” Bloom said. “I have few around here.”
