For nearly 12,000 years, Native American tribes hunted and fished along the Deschutes River before a single settler staked a claim in Central Oregon. The volcanic glass at Obsidian Cliffs in the Three Sisters Wilderness tells the longer story: tribes mined it here for centuries, and samples have turned up as far as the eastern United States — a trade network measured in thousands of miles, carved from a sharp edge of local stone. The Northern Paiute knew the deep canyon at what is now Cove Palisades as *udɨ huudɨ*. When Mount Mazama collapsed 7,700 years ago, Native Americans witnessed it and kept it alive in legend. Three tribes — the Warm Springs, Wasco, and Paiute peoples — hold that history today at the Museum at Warm Springs on the Warm Springs Reservation, just off Highway 26.
