Description
The Watlala are a group of Native Americans that inhabited the meadows of Sams Walker Day Use Site, near Skamania, Washington, and St. Cloud Ranch Day Use Site. An interpretive sign at Sams Walker states that the Watlata lived in earth-sheltered cedar plank homes. Another reports that they used willow branches to construct temporary structures. Also called the Cascade Indians, they were a Chinookian tribe who lived at the Cascades of the Columbia River and the Willamette River in Oregon.
Language
Chinookan
Culture
They fished and hunted the animals in the Cascade. In 1805-06 Lewis and Clark estimated that they numbered about 2,800 and in 1870, along with the Wasco, they had an estimated population of about 3,200. In 1829, the Native Americans of the region suffered an epidemic which was called "ague fever," of unknown nature, which killed in a single summer, some four-fifths of the population. After the epidemic, the Watlala seemed to have been the only remaining tribe, the remnants of the others having probably united under that name, though they were commonly called Cascade Indians by the whites.