Sahaptin

The Sahaptin are Plateau peoples speaking dialects of the Sahaptin language, among them the Umatilla, Tenino, Walla Walla, Klickitat, Palus and Wanapum. Their villages lined the Columbia River from the Cascades Rapids eastward and its tributaries in Oregon and Washington. Sahaptin is a Plateau Penutian tongue, and the name was given them by Salishan neighbours.

They had no clans, and their headmen were elected and guided by councils. Semisettled hunter-gatherers, they took salmon and deer, pit-roasted camas bulbs and baked kouse root into cakes. They wintered in long semisubterranean lodges sheathed in rush mats that could hold a hundred people, and raised buffalo-skin tipis on seasonal expeditions.

Lewis and Clark passed through their villages in 1805. The epidemics that followed contact cut their numbers steeply during the first half of the nineteenth century.