The lands drained by Oregon’s Grande Ronde River were first brought to the white man’s attention by Lewis and Clark who never set foot in any of the Grande Ronde country. Relying entirely on descriptions of the landscape provided by Nez Perce Indians living along Idaho’s Clearwater River, the explorers drew up a map clearly showing the spectacularly winding course of a river the Indians were calling “Wil-le-wah” which (they claimed) emptied into the Snake River upstream from the Clearwater. The impressive meanders of this river now called the Grande Ronde were precisely what the Indians were emphasizing with their word (now properly spelled “Weliwe”) that Lewis and Clark adopted for their map. “Entrenched meanders” is how geologists now describe what the Indians were describing, and the Grande Ronde exhibits some of the world’s best examples of this phenomenon. The Indians clearly appreciated what was distinctive about a river confined to a precipitous, meandering canyon.

By the time that Captain Bonneville’s expedition explored the lower Grande Ronde thirty years later in 1834, Lewis and Clark’s Wil-le-wah River had become known to white Americans—to Bonneville and to Washington Irving in any case— as the “Way-Lee-Way.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had his own way with this Nez Perce word when he wrote of the “Walloway” in a poem. Nobody then who used the word or its various corruptions knew they were talking about this river’s unique geomorphology. But the Indians knew.

French Canadian fur trappers referred to the river’s flat and round upper valley near today’s city of La Grande as the Grande Ronde, and their name for the valley eventually prevailed over the Nez Perce name for the river as a whole.

To settle another matter, none of the versions of the Nez Perce word ‘Weliwe’ (referencing a river’s meanders) had anything to do with the origin and meaning of ‘Wallowa’ which is the white man’s rendition of an entirely different Nez Perce word, ‘Walawa,’ which refers to a tripod device used in trapping fish. ‘Wallowa’ was coined as an English word at a precise moment in 1865 when the first surveyors invaded what is now called the Wallowa Valley and encountered an Indian. Asked for the name of the river he was standing next to, the Indian reportedly said “Walawa” (meaning fishtrap river, perhaps) which sounded like ‘Wallowa’ to the ears of the surveyors, and that’s what they wrote down, spelling the word then as it is spelled now. (This account of the origin of ‘Wallowa’ can be found in the writings of esteemed Wallowa County historian Grace Bartlett.) So today we have the Wallowa River, Wallowa Lake, Wallowa Mountains, and Wallowa County—all because the surveyors ran into a particular Indian at a particular moment in 1865.

The collection of photos in this Grande Ronde portfolio pertains to locations in the Grande Ronde River watershed but does not include lands drained by the Wallowa River (yes, a tributary of the Grande Ronde) which deserve their own pages (see the Wallowa Mountain, Wallowa Valley, and Zumwalt portfolios for those scenes). Joseph Creek and its tributaries in the Chesnimnus country drain into the Grande Ronde and are therefore included in this gallery, as is the Wenaha River, a major tributary of the Grande Ronde, flowing out of the Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness. For more photos of the Grande Ronde River country, see other portfolios on this website.