The oldest story this place keeps: a Native legend of how Multnomah Falls came to pour off a cliff that once stood bare and dry. When a sickness swept the river villages and an ancient remedy called for an unthinkable sacrifice, the daughter of a Multnomah chief made a choice of her own, alone, at the top of the cliff. What followed, the people say, has not stopped falling since. A solemn, beautifully told tale of love, loss, and the face some still glimpse in the morning mist of the upper falls. It leaves listeners looking up at all 620 feet of water a little differently, without ever settling whether the face is real.
Pull in close now, and you might lower your voice a touch, because the tale that belongs to this place is a solemn one. They call me Ranger Boone Merrick, and the people of this river have been telling this story a long sight longer than there has been a railing for you to lean on. They tell it this way. There was no waterfall here once — only the bare cliff, dry rock standing over the river. In those days the old chief of the Multnomah had a daughter, and the people had gathered along the water to see her married. But a sickness came down the Columbia that season, and it went through the villages like wind through dry grass, taking the young and the old alike. The medicine man was very old, and he remembered a thing he had been told when he was a boy: that a sickness like this one would not lift until the daughter of a chief gave up her own life to the Great Spirit — freely, of her own will, from the top of the cliff above the river. The chief would not ask it of her. What father could? So he said nothing. But the girl saw the sickness spreading through the very people she had been promised to. And one night, without a word to anyone, she climbed the trail to the top of this cliff alone — and she did not come back down the way she went up. When they found her below, the grieving chief lifted his face and begged the Great Spirit for one sign that his daughter's spirit had been received. And the story says the water came then. It came pouring off that bare rock where no water had ever run, and friend, it has not stopped from that day to this one. They say that on a still morning, in the fine mist of the upper fall, you can see her face looking back at you. Now, I have stood right here at first light when that mist comes drifting up the rock, and I will tell you honest — maybe you see her, and maybe you only see what a man told you to look for. I cannot settle that for you. But the water is real. Six hundred and twenty feet of it, falling the whole time you have stood here. And the people say it began with a girl who loved her own more than she loved her life. You look up at it a little different now, don't you.
