The Dalles, Oregon: Why the Name Starts With "The"

The Dalles, Oregon, took its name from what French boatmen called the Columbia River’s rapids upstream: dalle, a word for a trough or a flagstone. The town was named for those rapids, the dalles, and the “The” came along with the name.

“What is the ‘The’ there for?”

People have been asking for a long time. A 1905 history of central Oregon expected newcomers to stumble over it: someone seeing the name in print, it said, “would be disposed to ask ‘What is the “The” there for?’” Its answer was firm. If you want to keep “the good will of the good people of The Dalles,” you call the town The Dalles.

The great trough of the Columbia

That same history reprints an early explanation, from a talk Dr. William C. McKay gave in town on May 18, 1869. The book calls him “an authority on the subject of names.” McKay said the early French voyageurs knew the falls of the Columbia “at the Indian fishery, six miles above this place, as Le Dalle, from the French word Dalle, signifying a trough — literally the trough of the Columbia.”

The boatmen feared that spot. Running the rapids “always required great courage, dexterity and experience,” McKay said, and “many a poor voyageur found a watery grave in the whirlpools.” Because the spot was so dreaded, “they gave it the name of Le Grande Dalle de la Columbia — The Great Trough of the Columbia.”

Trough or flagstone?

You’ll find two translations, and they’re both real. Henry Gannett, the government geographer who wrote the 1905 book on American place names, says “dalles” was the name the Hudson’s Bay Company gave to deep rock chasms that squeeze a river into a narrow passage. He calls it “A French word meaning ‘flagstone,’ ‘slab,’ also a ‘spout for water’ or ‘trough.’” The federal GNIS database picks the first meaning: the name “derives from the French word dalle, which means flagstone.” McKay picked the second. Both meanings sit side by side in Gannett’s entry, so neither translation is wrong.

The Landing, Fort Dalles, Dalles City

The town didn’t start out with the French name. The 1905 history says that for a short time it was called “The Landing.” In 1857, Col. N. H. Gates took a bill to the territorial legislature to incorporate “Fort Dalles,” and on June 26, 1857, the charter was granted to Dalles City.

Then the mail got confused. In 1889, the local Times-Mountaineer explained that the post office had been Dalles City for years, but “a somewhat similar name in Polk county — Dallas — caused considerable annoyance,” so on the postal register it became “The Dalles.” The paper added that the charter still said Dalles City. GNIS dates the switch to 1860, but the 1905 history says the official name of the town was still “Dalles City,” though “it is only known thus in official proceedure.”

So the name didn’t come from the town’s own riverbank at all. It came from rapids six miles upstream that French boatmen were afraid of, and in everyday use it won out over the name in the town’s own charter.

Sources & further reading

• An Illustrated History of Central Oregon (1905), pp. 128–129, 133. The “What is the ‘The’ there for?” passage, Dr. William C. McKay’s 1869 talk on the “trough of the Columbia,” “The Landing,” the 1889 Times-Mountaineer item on Dallas, and the 1857 charter for Dalles City.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). The Hudson’s Bay Company’s “dalles” and the meanings “flagstone,” “slab,” “spout for water” and “trough” (p. 99); The Dalles “named for the rapids” (p. 299).
• GNIS feature 1167723 (U.S. Geological Survey). Incorporated as Dalles City in 1857, renamed The Dalles in 1860, and dalle as “flagstone.”