Next up we're looking at yet another really obscure Columbia Gorge train bridge. This one is on Tumalt Creek, which is in the Dodson/Warrendale area just east of the main tourist corridor, and we're on a dead-end back road instead of continuing down the old highway since the road and train don't run parallel through here. This one is behind some trees and bushes and we can't see it as well, but the federal GIS system I'm getting this info from says that like the others we've looked at, it's single track, non-moveable, and this time the design type is just listed as "Unknown", with a unique ID of "W1007_OR24756". From what I could see of it, this one seems to be on a concrete beam instead of steel, and if I had to guess when it was built I would probably guess no earlier than the 1990s. The reason for that is the creek it's on, which is the largest of about a dozen in this stretch of the gorge, all of which are prone to massive landslides of mud and rocks and giant boulders, and this creek specifically was one of those involved in the 1996 slides that closed I-84 for weeks. I don't know whether this bridge was ever physically washed out at any point, but at minimum all that material coming down and trying to flow underneath is at least going to cause a bit of excess wear and tear over time.
The name "Tumalt" is not the result of Lewis & Clark trying to spell "tumult", although that would be a reasonable guess. This was one of the names bestowed in 1916 when the Mazamas (a prominent local mountaineering club) decided that prominent sights along the new Columbia River Highway should generally have Indian names, with a few melodramatic bits of European mythology tossed in. (Note that these were not actually what local tribes called these places before settlers showed up, but a selection of exotic-yet-pronounceable words, often with background stories that white people found appealing in 1916. In particular, the creek is named after Tumulth, a member of the Cascades tribe, and a tragic figure of the Yakima War of 1855-1858, and specifically the 1856 "Cascades Massacre", a raid on the white settlement of Cascades (near present-day North Bonneville, WA) by members of the Yakama and allied tribes. The local Cascades tribe was apparently not involved in this incident, but became the focus of settler retaliation afterward as they lived nearby and it was more convenient, and Tumulth was one of several men who were summarily hanged for their supposed involvement. Here are a few links for more info about him and the whole conflict:
- HistoryLink article. HistoryLink is basically Washington's Oregon Encyclopedia, and the article comes across as basically fair, though it largely only cites Euro-American sources.
- 2016 Quartux Journal article
- An Oregon Encyclopedia article about his daughter, Kalliah Tumulth, written by a great-grandson of hers.
- 2022 post and comment thread in the Yakama Nation Hunters and Gatherers Facebook group, including comments by at least one descendant.
- a biographical sketch by another descendant, in a 2022 quarterly newsletter from the La Center History Museum.
Before the current name, the creek was widely known as "Devil's Slide Creek" due to its ongoing geological tendencies. Yet despite that name two distinct towns sprang up in the main landslide corridor, Dodson right around here, complete with its own train station, and Warrendale a mile or so to the east, both named after local canned salmon tycoons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Frank Warren, namesake of Warrendale, was possibly the biggest and wealthiest of them all, but his fishy empire quickly fell apart after his watery demise on the Titanic, which roughly coincided with a crash in the salmon population. Seriously. You can't make this stuff up. Or, I mean, technically you can, but reviewers will roll their eyes and make fun of your ridiculous hamfisted plot twists.
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