On Sauvie Island, you can canoe on a lake that is within an island that is in a river. There are only a handful of river islands in the continental United States where canoeists have that opportunity.Located northwest of Portland and south of Scappoose, the island is about seventeen miles long and almost five miles wide, approximately 26,000 acres that include land, lakes, and water courses. Multnomah Channel borders the island on the west, with the Columbia River on the north and east and the Willamette River on the south.

According to Hartline and Welle (see end of entry for reference), about one-third of the land on the island is privately owned; the remainder is owned by a mix of federal, state, county, and local jurisdictions, such as Metro and Port Districts. Most of the state land is managed by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, and some small parcels are managed by the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department. The Oregon Department of State Lands owns the rivers, lakes, and other navigable waterways.

The island was formed 16 million to 12 million years ago when large flows of lava (volcanic basalt) formed the cliffs of the Columbia Gorge and Warrior Point on the north end of Sauvie Island. At the center of the island, approximately a million years ago, glaciation and floods deposited sand that created Oak Island. Subsequent deposits of gravels, sand, and soils from the Columbia and Willamette Rivers formed Sauvie Island around the older ledge of Warrior Rock and the core of Oak Island.

As determined by geologists (and discussed in further detail in Hartline and Welle), the Missoula Floods, which occurred 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, carried the soils and rocks of what is now eastern Washington into the Portland Basin, and the volcanic basalt formations near St. Helens caused water to back up across the Willamette Valley, depositing sand and gravel in the area that is now Sauvie Island. At times portions of the present-day Portland basin was under as much as 400 feet of water, leaving approximately 100 to 200 feet of sediment in the area of the island. Secondary channels, lakes, and sloughs formed on the island and were then covered up, and plants, animals, and people thrived with annual flooding and the resulting changes in soil composition.

Two to three thousand years ago, the Multnomah people, also called the Wappato Island Indians, hunted, gathered tubers, and built villages on Sauvie Island. This was also about the time when, perhaps because of flooding or a rise in sea level rise, the island separated from the mainland, creating Multnomah Channel.  Because of the nature of flooding of the number of people who lived on the island ranged from two to six thousand. They lived in at least fifteen villages in cedar log houses that were about thirty yards long and a dozen yards wide. The population of the island increased during salmon and wapato harvesting seasons. They also harvested acorns, which were placed in deep pits lined with hemlock boughs in areas of underground springs, where the water leached away the toxic tannins over the winter.

In 1792, Captain George Vancouver dispatched Lieutenant William Broughton to survey the Columbia River for the British Admiralty. Broughton landed on the north end of the island, where Broughton named Warrior Point (also called Warrior Rock). The Lewis and Clark Expedition stopped at the island on November 4, 1805, naming it Wapato Island for the tubers that local people harvested. In the 1830s, the Hudson Bay Company established dairies on the island to support its Fort Vancouver property across the river, as well as to provide butter for export to Russian settlement farther north as well as to other British markets. The dairies were managed by Laurent Sauvé, for whom the island was renamed. Just prior to Sauvé’s time, in the early 1800s, it must be mentioned that smallpox infected the people of Sauvie Island, devastating the population base and, in turn, much of the cultural traditions of these indigenous people. Then, in the 1830s, as the Hudson’s Bay employees began settling in the region, malaria swept across the island, killing a large percentage of Chinooks and other native people.Additional Euro-American settlers arrived during the late 1840s. By the mid-1850s, emigrants had land claims on most of Sauvie Island and had established farms there. It should also be said that the occupation and “taking” of the island was done not without resistance. The Chinook chieftain Kiesno claimed that his people owned the land of Sauvie Island—and the adjacent shores of the Columbia River—which inspired subsequent historians and writer to remark on both his claims and his eloquence. (See the OE entry for Kiesno.)

Beginning in the 1920s, dikes were built to increase the amount of tillable land and to protect houses and farms from annual flooding caused by Columbia and Willamette River freshets. In addition, the Gilbert River and other streams and sloughs on the island were straightened with dynamite in an effort to further the drainage of water through the island and to “flush” out silt that, over the years, builds up in the channels and creeks of the island. To further increase tillable lands, pumps were installed on the north end of the island to pull and transport water out of the wetlands and into canals leading to the Multnomah Channel. Most of the island’s native grasses and prairie plants were plowed under and displaced by non-native pasture grasses and crops, as farmers produced milk, meat, vegetables, and fruits for Portland and surrounding areas. (Again, see Hartline and Welle on this process.)

Grass carp and species such as bass, catfish, crappie, bluegill, perch, and panfish were introduced to the island’s lakes and waterways. The fish were devastating to wetland plant communities and wildlife, as they churned up the bottoms of the lakes, rooted out wapato and other species, and displaced native fish. Other invasive plant and animal species also moved into the area with the help of human activities.

In 1947, the Oregon Game Commission (now the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife) established the Sauvie Island Wildlife Area, over 11,000 acres on the north end of the island. An updated Wildlife Area Management Plan completed in 2010 listed the challenges facing the area, including a “dramatic increase in public use, an ever-increasing wintering population of geese, developing new wetlands, and restoring other habitat types.” Public use of the beaches on the Columbia side of the Island as well as the numerous trails that now lace the northern portions of the island continue to put increasing pressure on wildlife.

Sauvie Island received electricity in 1936 and telephone service in 1948. And the US Army Corps of Engineers’ creation of the levees to protect farmland at the southern end of the island have added arable land to the infrastructure of Sauvie Island. The last ferry closed in 1950, the same year that a small bridge was built connecting the island to the mainland (the bridge was replaced in 2008) and the gravel county road at the southern end of the island was paved. A local public K-8 charter school, a nondenominational church, and an Oregon Grange remain as the principal institutions on the island. In the twenty-first century, residents and visitors are served by farm stores and markets, but there is no village or commercial area.

Rural residences and agriculture are the primary uses of private property on Sauvie Island. Some of the larger landholdings and multigenerational farms were divided into smaller plots before the 1960s, and many have been purchased by people looking for respite from urban areas. In the 1970s, state land-use policies formalized the island as an agricultural preserve, and recently arrived residents, many of them women, raise and sell livestock and diversified crops of fruits and vegetables. Metro, a regional agency, owns several properties on Sauvie Island, including Howell Territorial Park, on the Gilbert River. The park, which is open to the public, includes wetlands, restored prairies, and Oregon white oaks.

As Hartline and Welle and others have described, Oregon’s Parks and Recreation Department manages the 150-acre Wapato Greenway Access Area and a few smaller parcels on the island as well as the east side of Scappoose Bay. The Greenway, the only state park property in the area on the island that allows year-round public access, includes marshland, open water, riparian hardwood forest, Oregon white oak and Douglas-fir forest, upland prairie, and wet shrubland and prairie. The area’s vegetation also includes emergent wetlands, weedy shrublands, submerged and aquatic plant communities, and non-native grasslands such as reed canary grass.

Over a million people visit Sauvie Island each year, primarily because of the recreational opportunities that include berry-picking, birdwatching, hiking, and cycling on more than thirty miles of paved roads.