Lewis and Clark (6 page)

Clark saw at once that they could not possibly portage the heavy canoes over the difficult rock, but Cruzatte, their most experienced waterman, agreed with him that with good handling, the canoes could be taken through the dangerous waters: “. . . accordingly I deturmined to pass through this place notwithstanding the horrid appearance of this agitated gut swelling, boiling & whorling in every direction, which from the top of the rock did not appear as bad as when I was in it; however we passed Safe to the astonishment of all the Inds. . . .”

Their progress was watched by local Indians from the rocks above. Once safely through, the Americans were entertained by another group of Indians who lived below The Dalles. These Indians wore clothes made from cedar bark, Clark noted, and lived in “the first wooden houses in which Indians have lived since we left those in the vicinity of Illinois.” They had no horses at all and navigated the river in canoes - hewn from the tallest trees the explorers had yet seen, and carved with intricate designs. Clark observed that their principal food was dried and pounded fish, and he counted “107 stacks . . . in different places on those rocks which must have contained 10,000 lb of neet fish.”

The captains held peace talks between these Indians and their two Nez Percé guides, while the men danced to Cruzatte’s violin. Clark noted only one problem the next morning: “I could not sleep for the noise kept [up] by the swans [and] ducks. They were so immensely numerous and their cries horrid.”

After they passed The Dalles area, Twisted Hair and Tetoharsky said goodbye to the captains, explaining that they could be of no further service because they did not understand the language of the tribes downriver. They bought horses from a nearby village, and after a parting smoke, set off for home.

The expedition spent two days repairing the canoes, but was water-borne again on October 28. By November 2, they had passed the splashing waterfalls of the Cascade Mountains and were at last on tidewater, where they could feel the ebb and flow of the Pacific. But the fog and mist on the river was so dense the men could scarcely see past the end of their canoes.

On November 7, the fog lifted, and Clark wrote in the notebook he kept open constantly on his knee: “Ocian in view! O! the joy!” That night he recorded in his journal: “Great joy in camp we are in view of the Ocian, this great Pacific Octean which we been so long anxious to See. And the roreing or noise made by the waves brakeing on the rockey Shores (as I suppose) may be heard disti[n]ctly.”

It was not the ocean he had spotted, in fact, but the eastern end of Gray’s Bay, still more than twenty miles from the coast. The men’s elation did not last long.

Although they had nearly reached the Pacific, the captains and their men were far from the end of their troubles. They were still miles from the mouth of the Columbia, but the river was now so wide – some half a dozen miles - that the heaving and rolling ocean reached into the estuary, making the canoes bob like corks, and the men seasick.

On November 8, the day after Clark mistakenly reported seeing the ocean, the expedition paddled another eight miles downriver but was finally forced ashore on the north bank of the estuary. They found little refuge there; the hills were so steep, they could not leave the beach, and the water was too salty to drink. To add to their misery, the rain that had been falling for days continued all night.

The next day was worse. It continued to rain, and a brisk southerly wind sent waves directly into the mouth of the estuary. Not only was their camping place flooded, but the high tide and waves brought churning driftwood - dead trees as much as 200 feet long and seven feet thick - into the Columbia, nearly crushing their canoes. Clark’s optimism was already fading; “at this dismal point, we must spend another night” he wrote, “as the wind and waves are too high to proceed.”

The third day, they moved a short distance and camped in a gully, where the drifted logs had jammed into a solid pile just above water level. “The logs on which we lie is all on flote every high tide,” Clark wrote miserably. All they had to eat was dried pounded fish they had bought from the Indians at the Great Falls. Private Joseph Field went out to hunt for his famished comrades, but the hills were so steep and the undergrowth so dense that he could do nothing. The continuing downpour loosened stones on the steep hillsides that rolled down on the unhappy party.

On the fifth morning, lightning, thunder, hail, and violent rain encouraged the expedition to take advantage of a low tide to move half a mile to a small brook where they were slightly better protected. Captain Clark’s enthusiasm was completely sapped. “It would be distressing to a feeling person to see our situation at this time,” he wrote, “all wet and cold with our betting etc. also wet, in a cove scarcely enough to contain us, our Baggage in a small holler about 1/2 mile from us, and the canoes at the mercey of the waves & drift wood. . . . Our Situation is dangerous.”

The next day, November 13, Captain Clark climbed the steep heights behind them to scout for a better location, but when he reached the top, he could see nothing because of the heavy clouds. On his return, he sent scouts John Colter, Alexander Willard, and George Shannon downriver in a canoe to look for a safer campsite because the waves were again sending driftwood surging dangerously near their present spot.

The next morning, five Indians in a canoe managed to land despite the rain and high waves. Shortly afterward, John Colter strode along the shore and accused the Indians of stealing his fishing gear. The Indians would not give up the stolen articles until a gun was aimed at them. This kind of thievery was to be a constant problem in Oregon.

Colter reported that he and his comrades had found a “butifull Sand beech” around the point, and that Willard and Shannon had gone ahead to check out the land. That afternoon, Lewis and a party of four set out to look for a sheltered bay at the mouth of the Columbia where, according to the natives, white-sea captains usually anchored their vessels. Five men took Lewis’s party by canoe as far as the beach Colter had found; they struggled back at dusk with their craft almost foundering in the waves.

At camp, Clark made some unhappy observations about the condition of the expedition’s supplies: “The rain &c. which has continued without a longer i[n]termition than 2 hours at a time for ten days past has distroyd the robes and rotted nearly one half of the flew clothes the party has, perticularley the leather clothes. If we have cold weather before we can kill & Dress Skins for clothing the bulk of the party will Suffer . . .”

Soon after parting from Colter, Willard and Shannon met twenty natives so excessively friendly that the two explorers grew suspicious. After sitting up late around the campfire with their unwelcome guests, the two finally laid down with their rifles under their heads.

In the morning, the guns were gone. When the Indians refused to return them, Shannon picked up a club and was about to use it on a man he suspected when another Indian began to load a musket. Shannon put his weapon down and warned the men that if they did not return the stolen rifles, a party of white men would come down the river and kill them. Just then, Lewis and his comrades appeared on their way to the ocean, and the terrified Indians gave the guns to Willard and Shannon.

The captains had little respect for the Indians of the lower Columbia. Clark conceded that the Chinook women, the chief nation of the area, had handsome faces, but otherwise, he wrote, they were “low and badly made with large legs & thighs which are generally Swelled from a Stopage of the circulation in the feet (which are Small) by maney strands of Beeds . . . drawn tight around the leg above the ankle.” He could find nothing good to say about the men: “The Men are low homely and badly made, Small crooked legs large feet, and all of both Sects have flattened heads.” The Chinooks achieved these flattened heads by compressing the foreheads of their infants between two padded boards. It was not painful, nor did it affect intelligence, but it left their heads permanently altered.

No one could deny, however, that they were the finest boat handlers the white men had ever seen; they could take their big, well-designed canoes over the roughest water with great skill and ease.

Clark managed to move camp a short distance downriver from the miserable spot they had been living. Their new camp was on a sandy beach, and with no timber nearby, they were again forced to break their usual rule of never taking anything that belonged to the Indians without paying a fair price for it. They helped themselves to boards from a nearby Chinook village, “deserted by the Inds & in full possession of the flees.” (They had found every Indian village below the Great Falls of the Columbia, even those long deserted, to be infested with fleas.) Their new camp had a wide view of the ocean, from Cape Disappointment on the north side of the Columbia estuary to Point Adams on the south.

When Lewis returned to camp on November 17, Clark announced that anyone else who wanted to see the “main Ocian” should be ready to start early the next morning. Ten men “and my man York” went with him, traveling along the stream-cut beach between their camp and Cape Disappointment. There they climbed a hill and tried to make out where the main channel of the Columbia entered the ocean, but the crashing waves where the river and sea met made it impossible to decide where the deepest channel lay. John Meares, the British sea captain who explored the area in 1788, named the headland Cape Disappointment for the same reason. Meares believed he had failed to find the Great River of the West because he did not recognize that the bay concealed the mouth of the Columbia.

Clark’s party camped on the shores of the Pacific. Clark noted: “Men appear much Satisfied with their trip beholding with estonishment the high waves dashing against the rocks & this emence Ocian.”

The next day, they explored, going north and returning to the river, encountering small parties of Indians along the way. Upon their return, they found Lewis entertaining numerous Chinooks, including two chiefs.

One of the natives wore a magnificent robe made of sea-otter pelts, which the captains tried to purchase. But the owner would accept only blue beads, and although the captains had red and white beads left in their meager supply of trading goods, most of the blue beads remaining in the camp were in a belt that Sacagawea wore. In exchange for the belt, Lewis and Clark offered her a “coate of Blue Cloth,” and they were able to buy the otter robe.

It rained continually. Clark struck a note of despair in his November 22 journal entry: “O! how horriable is the day waves brakeing with great violence against the Shore throwing the Water into our Camp &c. all wet and confind to our Shelters.”

Hunting had been poor; on November 24, the hunters brought in a single goose, the captains were forced to make hard decisions about where the expedition would spend the winter. The neighboring Chinooks depended mainly on dried fish and roots for winter food and did not have much to share. In any case, the prices they asked were so high that the expedition could not buy enough food to carry them through the winter. The captains still hoped to replenish their stores by purchasing goods from a trading ship, but they certainly could not count on that for their supply.

They would have to depend on their guns. The Indians told them they would find deer upriver, while elk were more plentiful to the south, on the opposite shore of the Columbia. Elk were larger and easier to kill, and their hides could more easily be made into clothing. There would be advantages to moving upriver, but by remaining near the ocean, their chances of sighting a trading ship were greatly increased. On the ocean, too, they could make salt, which they had been short of a long time. The commanding officers talked the matter over with the men, and Patrick Gass recorded that “most of them were of opinion, that it would be best . . . to go over to the south side of the river, and ascertain whether good hunting ground could be found there.” The choice was then put to a vote, in which every member of the party – including York and Sacagawea - had equal say.

On November 26, the expedition moved to the south bank. Before departing, Clark noted, “Capt. Lewis Branded a tree with his name, Date, etc. . . . The party all Cut the first letters of their names on different trees. . . . I marked my name, the Day & year on an alder tree. . . . William Clark. By Land from the U. States in 1804 & 1805.”

For a time, they were almost as miserable as they had been on the north side of the river. The land was low and marshy, the rains continued, and although hunters went out every day, they came home empty-handed. The expedition had little to eat but the pounded fish bought at the falls the month before. By December 2, this was causing so much sickness among the men that a change of diet was absolutely necessary. That day, Joseph Field shot an elk six miles from camp, and several men set off in a canoe to bring it in. The sun shone briefly as they returned the next day with the carcass. It was the first elk they had killed west of the Rockies, and it provided a feast that raised everyone’s spirits.

Lewis and several men spent nearly a week exploring the boggy country and finally selected a site for a winter camp three miles up a small stream he named Netul River – today, the Lewis and Clark River - flowing into the Columbia. There, on a slight rise well above high tide, amid a grove of tall firs, the party began building cabins on December 8. Clark was especially happy to leave the mouth of the Columbia: “The sea which is imedeately in front roars like a repeeted roling thunder and have rored in that way ever since our arrival in its borders which is now 24 days since we arrived in sight of the Great Western Ocian, I cant say Pasific as since I have seen it, it has been the reverse.”

The men worked in the rain to build cabins. The bad weather was affecting them; a number were ill, and several had boils. Although they had smoked the elk meat, it spoiled in the humid air, and the pounded fish, which they still depended upon in emergencies, was becoming moldy. The one consolation was that they had plenty of timber to build their fort. Gass, the ex-carpenter, noted how easily it split into boards “10 feet long and 2 broad, not more than an inch-and-a-half thick.”

By Christmas Day, the camp was almost complete, and the party fixed in their huts. The captains handed out tobacco to the men who used it, and gave a handkerchief to the nonsmokers. Sacagawea gave Captain Clark a gift of two-dozen ermine tails. But their attempts to have a merry Christmas fell flat, as Clark revealed: “We would have Spent this day the nativity of Christ in feasting, had we any thing either to raise our Sperits or even gratify our appetites . . . our Diner concisted of pore Elk, so much Spoiled that we eate it thro’ mear necessity, Some Spoiled pounded fish and a fiew roots.”

Ordway took a more positive view: “. . . all are in good health which we esteem more than all the ardent Spirits in the world. We . . . Still keep in good Spirits as we expect this to be the last winter that we will have to pass this way.”

They completed the camp on December 30, 1805, and named it Fort Clatsop after their friendly Indian neighbors. Unlike Fort Mandan, it was square, with four small cabins in a row fifty feet long facing another row of three cabins twenty feet away. Sharpened palisades connected the two rows, and on the southern side there was a pair of gates guarded by a sentry.

With the expedition’s salt supply exhausted, the captains sent five men, equipped with “5 of the largest Kittles,” to the ocean to find a good place to make salt. This was done by evaporating sea water over a slow fire and scraping the dry salt encrusting the kettles into a keg. In early January, the salt-makers sent back a gallon of fine white salt and the welcome news that they could produce almost a gallon a day.

A stranded whale on the coast caused considerable excitement. Some Indians had reported seeing the monstrous animal washed up several miles south, and on January 5, a party of men prepared to start out the next morning in hopes of obtaining oil and blubber to feed the Corps. Sacagawea insisted on accompanying the party.

When they reached the whale two days later, they discovered the Indians had reduced it to a skeleton, which Clark measured out at 105 feet long. After much haggling, Clark was able to buy 300 pounds of blubber and a few gallons of whale oil from the Tillamook Indians who had cut up the animal. “Small as this stock is,” he wrote, “I prise it highly . . . and think [God] much more kind to us than he was to jonah, having Sent this Monster to be Swallowed by us in Sted of Swallowing of us as Jonah’s did.”

Life at Fort Clatsop settled into a rain-soaked routine. Although the supply of game was adequate, the animals were thin and their meat was poor. If not for Drouillard, the party would have gone hungry - on one day alone, he killed seven elk. The salt-makers on the coast kept their kettles boiling, but the salt supply grew slowly as the men tanned elk skins and made clothing and moccasins for the fifteen-mile trip back.