The Dalles

The Dalles appears in Chief Bromden’s narration not as a continuously depicted setting but as a landmark embedded in family stories. It is connected to an afternoon’s bird hunt with Papa, to Chief’s account of his mother’s origins, and to the jail where Papa and an uncle spent time after the family dug up Chief’s grandmother. Across these memories, the town marks points of contact between the family’s life and the wider world: a borrowed hunting dog, a mother who came from town, and punishment imposed by the law.

Setting and Recollection

Chief recalls the town while trying to retreat mentally from the ward. Hiding in a mop closet before a morning shave, he tries to think back to the village and the Columbia River, including a hunt with Papa near The Dalles. The memory offers a concrete place to turn toward, but does not keep the immediate fear away: the black aide searches for him, and the recollection gives way to his capture and forced return to the shaving room. The town is thus present through a remembered landscape rather than a current visit.

The town also enters the hunting memory through a borrowed pointer. Papa has obtained the dog from a man in The Dalles, contrasting it with the village’s mongrel dogs, which he regards as poor hunters. In the cedar grove, the dog circles beneath a bird hidden in a scrub cedar, trying to locate it by scent. The bird remains safe while it holds still, but eventually breaks cover and flies into Papa’s birdshot. The remembered scene makes the town a practical connection to the hunt, while the action itself turns on stillness, scent, and the bird’s fatal attempt to escape.

Family Origins and Stories

Chief identifies his mother, Mary Louise Bromden, as a town woman from The Dalles, not an Indian woman. He recounts an estimate made by a man at a carnival, who put her at five feet nine inches and 130 pounds when he saw her; in Chief’s telling, she continued to grow until she was bigger than Papa and Chief together. The striking scale of this family story is part of the remembered account, not an independently verified description. Its connection to The Dalles is specific: the town is the place from which Chief says his mother came.

The account also brings the town into an exchange about how Chief’s father was diminished. Chief rejects the idea that his mother alone made Papa little. Instead, he says that everybody worked on him because he was big, would not give in, and did as he pleased, just as people are working on the person addressed in the conversation. The memory links the family’s history to a broader pattern of pressure and resistance without making The Dalles itself the cause of Papa’s change.

The Jail and the Family’s Defiance

The Dalles is also where Papa and Uncle Running-and-Jumping Wolf were jailed after they dug up Chief’s grandmother following her funeral. Chief’s mother did not go with them and objected to the act. Papa and his brother spent twenty days in the drunk tank at The Dalles jail, playing rummy, under the charge described as “Violation of the Dead.” The account gives the legal consequence plainly, but places it beside the family’s insistence that the deceased was their mother.

This episode gives the town a different role from the hunting memory: it is the location of confinement and official punishment. The family action and the jail sentence remain sharply juxtaposed. Chief recounts the digging-up without supplying further details about its circumstances, while the brief protest over kinship explains why Papa and his brother reject the act’s treatment as merely an offense. The Dalles is the place where that family conflict meets the law.

Narrative Significance

The town’s significance comes from the range of memories attached to it, not from a broad description of its streets, institutions, or daily life. It is reached indirectly through objects and incidents: a borrowed pointer, a carnival estimate of Chief’s mother, a grave, and a jail sentence. These details make the place a recurring coordinate in Chief’s recollections of the family and village, even as the memories differ in tone and consequence.

The town also helps shape the movement of the narration between present danger and remembered experience. During the shaving-room episode, Chief reaches toward the hunt as a refuge, but the memory cannot hold off the fear of the ward. Elsewhere, recollections tied to The Dalles disclose family origins and the consequences of an act of mourning. The place therefore functions less as an escape destination than as a narrative anchor: it gives particular locations to memories that carry both intimacy and conflict.