The Snake River's Lost Falls

Shoshone Falls, though largely captured for most of the year to run turbines for power generation, does sometimes run wild in the spring, giving us a taste of what it once looked like. We can see the free-falling water at Mesa Falls anytime, since it is the last large, unfettered falls on the Snake River.
 
Did you ever wonder what American Falls looked like prior to the building of the dam?
 

The earliest depiction of the falls that I’m aware of is a lithograph of the American Falls from a sketch by Charles Preuss. It appeared in John Charles Fremont’s first report to congress on his western explorations. Preuss was the cartographer for the expedition. His 1843 sketch of the falls is one of the earliest depictions of anything in what is now Eastern Idaho.
 
The sketch shows a dramatic drop of water, split by a rock island. But one must take the accuracy with a grain of salt. As stated in the book One Hundred Years of Idaho Art, 1850-1950,* by Sandy Harthorn and Kathleen Bettis, “Because Preuss was trained as a cartographer and not an artist, we can accept that his rather naïve drawings outline the land features rather than describe them as solid forms. Drawn in a stiff awkward manner, this deep vista appears exaggerated and fanciful. The river drops from a flattened plain over the edge of an angulated precipice more illusory than real.”

A second, more detailed lithograph was published in 1848. Though still depicting mountains in the background that are a little fanciful It shows a waterfall you’d certainly want to portage, unless you’re one of the kayakers who relishes a first drop. It looks about as daunting as Lower Mesa Falls, which kayakers occasionally run and live to tell about it.

Finally, here’s a photo from the early 1900s, well before the dam went in (1925). The locomotive steaming across the trestle is on the Oregon Shortline tracks, westbound.