The Chemnapum Indian man pushed back the flap of the tule mat lodge set on the gravel banks of the Columbia River.

He squinted as he stepped out into the hot sun. It was summer. He didn't know it, but white people on the other side of the continent had just declared their independence from other white people in England.

He stood on a spot that would become Richland - but only after those newly independent white people would burst across the continent.

He looked to his right to where the Yakima River emptied into the Columbia and saw driftwood racks loaded with split chinook salmon drying in the early morning sun, flies lazily buzzing about them. Dogs - a source of food for Indians, rather than pets - lurked near willows on the bank, waiting for a side of salmon to fall.

Nearby was a pile of shells from freshwater mussels, one of the mainstays of the Indian family's diet.

To the left, across an unbroken expanse of bunchgrass and sagebrush, loomed Rattlesnake Mountain, the focus of much Indian lore.

Tradition says that Rattlesnake and Mount Adams once were rivals for the attention of the Columbia River.

Rattlesnake, consumed with a jealous rage, was reduced in size and grandeur, leaving Mount Adams supreme.

Yet it was Rattlesnake that would lord over the horizon that marked the Indian's home for much of the year.

The man and his family spent many months each year at what is now Columbia Point.

His father had done so before him, his grandfather and great-grandfather before that - going back for thousands of years.

The Indians' tie to Columbia Point is long and lasting, overshadowing the short span of the white people, who first sent a lonely party to the place only 188 years ago.

Indian life was as simple and as solid as the seasons. If the fishing was good, other mat lodges would be pitched nearby and there would be much visiting, trading and telling of stories. When salmon runs faded, families would travel to highlands to pick berries in the autumn. In the spring, before the arrival of the salmon, they dug roots in sunny hollows.

But always, they returned to that magical spot where the Yakima and Columbia mixed their waters.

The village was called Chemna.

Downstream, where Chiawana Park is now located, was another village, and still further downstream - at today's Sacajawea Park - was another village.

Such was the scene when the first white man arrived in the early part of the 1800s.

Jim Chatters, a Richland archaeologist, has traced the Indians of the region back 11,000 years and described their way of life for the Three Faces of Richland program.

Barbara Kubik, a Kennewick historian, in another Three Faces of Richland program, concentrated on the 1800s.

The series focuses on the area's three faces: The Indians' Chemna, the farmers' Richland, and the government's Richland and Hanford.

The first explorers to visit the region were with the Lewis and Clark expedition in the fall of 1805.

Their journals - and those of explorers, traders, and missionaries who followed - provide the first written descriptions of the region and the lives of the people who first lived there. The spelling and grammar in the following quotations are as they originally appeared.

William Clark wrote on Oct. 17: "I took two men in a Small Canoe and assended the Columbia river 10 miles to an Island near the Stard. shore.

"From this island the natives showed me the enterance of a large Westerly fork, (the Yakima) which they called Tapetett at about 8 miles distance."

Clark told how he had shot a prairie cock for dinner, probably a sage grouse, now nearly extinct in the area.

Six years after Lewis and Clark, on July 8, 1811, David Thompson, a Canadian employed by the North West Company, stopped at a village of about 62 men and their families near Priest Rapids, saying he "smoked and discoursed" with the Indians.

A day later, he spent the night near today's Sacajawea Park, where there was a very large camp of about 150 men with their families.

Thompson erected a small pole with a sheet of paper and claimed all of the surrounding land for Great Britain.

A month later, Alexander Ross of the John Jacob Astor's American Pacific Fur Company, arrived at the mouth of the Snake River, near the spot that Thompson set up his pole.

"The crowd of Indians assembled at this place was immense. The Indians smoked, danced and chanted all night," he wrote.

The next morning Ross and his party of Americans saw the British flag flying from the center of the Indian village. It had been presented to the Indians by Thompson a month earlier.

Ignoring Thompson's bold claims, Ross decided to push on. He went to the mouth of the Yakima, where he described the view as "picturesque, surpassing anything we had seen."

The first white settlement at Chemna was by Catholic Missionary Father Pascal Ricard, who set up a crude mission on Oct. 11, 1847.

The deaths at the Whitman Mission spread fear among all missionaries in the region and the small mission at Chemna was soon moved farther up the Yakima Valley.

Tule lodges of Indians pitched beside the Yakima were still common when the first farmers arrived around the turn of the century.

But by the time the Hanford project began in 1943, there were few traces of Indian heritage in Richland.

A culture that had flourished for thousands of years at the confluence of Yakima and Columbia and Snake had been erased in 100 years.