Bridging A Great Divide: The Battle for the Columbia River Gorge by Kathie Durbin

Abstract

 Reviews Brown and Killen open the volume with a preface that outlines the scope of the project, their method and approach to editing the letters, and their attention to three “sensitive topics”: the use of ethnic labels, relations between missionaries and Native peoples, and the connection (or distance) between the perspectives of the editors and those expressed in the letters (p. xii). In the introduction, the editors provide a concise overview of Blanchet’s biography and his career, beginning with his ordination in Lower Canada in 1821.As Brown and Killen observe, Blanchet’s life spanned a dramatic and tumultuous period in the Pacific Northwest, and his correspondence provides a window in the multi-cultural, “cosmopolitan reality of the Washington Territory” during the 1800s (p.ix).The editors have arranged the letters chronologically,with each entry accompanied by a short introduction and followed by the annotations specific to that letter. The volume also contains a selected bibliography and a chronology of major events in Pacific Northwest history. The Selected Letters of A.M.A. Blanchet will appeal to scholars, students, and general readers interested in Pacific Northwest history. This is an expertly translated and edited collection that documents the region’s transition from an earlier period of mercantile capital expansion under the Hudson Bay Company and to the intensive process of AngloAmerican colonization following the Oregon Treaty of 1846. Brown and Killen have made accessible a set of primary sources that give voice to lesser known historical actors,including French Canadian and French-Indian settlers and Catholic female missionaries from French Canada. Equally significant are the ways in which the letters shed light on the cultural encounters between Catholic missionaries and the region’s Indian groups and on relations between Catholic clergy, military officers, territorial officials, and the Office of Indian Affairs. So, too, the correspondence with interlocutors in Canada, Europe, and Rome demonstrates the global dimensions of the Catholic evangelizing project in the Pacific Northwest. On the whole, this collection of a letters is a welcome addition to the regional historiography and will prove useful for classroom teaching as well as future research projects on the nineteenth century. Melinda Marie Jetté Franklin Pierce University, New Hampshire Bridging a Great Divide: The Battle for the Columbia River Gorge by Kathie Durbin Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2013. Photographs, index. 328 pages. $21.95 paper. Kathie Durbin began writing about Pacific Northwest environmental conflicts in 1989 as a reporter for the Oregonian, and she published two books about forest issues in the 1990s. The Columbia River Gorge became “a professional as well as a personal passion” for her when she was assigned to cover the place’s environmental, political, and economic affairs for the Columbian (Vancouver, Washington) newspaper in 1999 (p. 1). Bridging a Great Divide: The Battle for the Columbia River Gorge is based largely on interviews , and it is enhanced by the inclusion of many photographs.As the subtitle makes clear, Durbinreportsabouttheconflictsandcompromisesthatwerenegotiatedinthecontextof deep andcontinuingdivisions.Durbinhighlightstwo central contextual features: profound differences between approaches to land use planning andrelatedpropertyrightsissuesinOregonand Washington,andwidelydifferinglevelsof interest in Columbia River Gorge protection in the statecapitalsandamongenvironmentalactivists in their largest metropolitan areas.  OHQ vol. 115, no. 2 The first part, “The Vision,” tells the story of early efforts to protect the natural beauty of the gorge,the passage of the complex Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act (NSA Act) in 1986, which enabled the creation of the bi-state Columbia River Gorge Commission, and President Reagan’s reluctant acceptance of the bill.Durbin reminds readers that the gorge was not a wilderness at the time federal legislation was debated and passed, and the required balancing act built into the law — to protect scenic and natural resources and promote compatible economic development — would be an extremely difficult challenge under the best circumstances. The second part, “The Launch,” describes many of the trials and tribulations the Gorge Commission and the U.S. Forest Service confronted as they implemented the NSAAct.The law divided the gorge into more sensitive Special Management Areas and less sensitive General ManagementAreas; thirteen named urban places were exempt from regulation under the Act.The NSAAct mandated that the U.S.Forest Service produce a land...