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 mak
e 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.
During the long rainy days, Lewis and Clark organized their notes on plants, animals, weather, Indians, geography, and everything else they had observed since leaving Fort Mandan, putting the mountain of information into readable form.
By February 14, Clark had “completed a map of the Countrey through which we have been passing from the Mississippi at the Mouth of the Missouri to this place.” Clark had not been formally trained in cartography, but proved to be a natural genius at it. His own estimations and compass readings – which he took at every bend of the river or twist of the trail – were supplemented by information gathered from the Indians and traders they had met along the way. Clark grilled everyone for descriptions of the surrounding terrain, which he used to fill in map locations he had not personally seen. This still required a lot of guesswork; the Indians measured distance not by miles, but by “sleeps” or days of travel. But Clark’s map, he noted, “found the most practicable and navigable passage across the Continent of North America,” while also redefining the words “practicable” and “navigable.”
Still hoping to make contact with a British or American trading ship, the captains questioned the Indians about the traders who visited them, how long they stayed, and when they were expected to return. They had built their fort close to the ocean chiefly to keep track of any visiting vessels, as President Jefferson’s original instructions called for two of the expedition’s members to return by sea from the west coast, if at all possible. More importantly, they needed fresh trading goods before the rest of the party made the long return trip home. All they had left to trade for the food and horses they would need, Lewis noted, could be held in two handkerchiefs.
The great mystery is why Jefferson did not send a ship to the mouth of the Columbia to meet the expedition. One historian has suggested that the president did not want to risk offending Spain by dispatching a ship to the Pacific coast, but in fact, an American ship was in the area all the time.
The Boston brig Lydia arrived on the northwest coast in the spring of 1805 to trade and buy furs, and after spending the summer farther north, she re-entered the mouth of the Columbia that November, near the time Lewis and Clark were seeking traders in the area of Cape Disappointment. The Lydia plied along the coast throughout that winter, but the Indians apparently failed to tell her captain that his fellow Americans were encamped at Fort Clatsop until the expedition had left on the return journey.
In Washington, Jefferson had only recently been inaugurated for his second term as president when a delegation of native chiefs arrived at the Capitol. They represented tribes of Missouri, Oto, Arikara, and Yankton Sioux Indians that Lewis and Clark had met more than a year before. By way of introduction, the Indians showed letters and Peace Medals given to them by the explorers. The president thanked them for their assistance to “our beloved man” Lewis, promised them goods from American companies, and told them he hoped someday “that we may all live together as one household.” Once the delegation left, Jefferson sent a f note to Lewis’s mother, reporting that he was confident the expedition was going well. But he confided to someone else: “We have no certain information of Captain Lewis since he left Fort Mandan.”
At Fort Clatsop, the rainy winter turned into a rainy spring, and the captains decided to leave on or before April 1. They barely had enough supplies to get them to their cache on the forks of the Jefferson River, and the elk they depended on for food had moved inland toward the mountains.
Lewis traded his dress uniform coat and half a twist of tobacco for one canoe, but because the lower Columbia Indians valued a canoe as much as or more than they valued a wife, the captains could not buy another. In the end, they simply took a second canoe, telling themselves it was a fair exchange for some elk the Clatsops had stolen during the winter.
The captain’s last task was to fill in their departure date on several records of their visit and leave them with various Indians, to be turned over to any visiting white traders. One of these papers was actually given to the captain of the Lydia, who carried the news of their achievements to China, and from there to Philadelphia, nearly a year after the expedition had returned to civilization. Another note was tacked to a wall at Fort Clatsop: “The object of this list is, that through the medium of some civilized person who may see the same, it may be made known to the informed world, that the party consisting of the persons whose names are hereunto annexed, and who were sent out by the government of the U’States in May 1804 to explore the interior of the Continent of North America, did penetrate the same by way of the Missouri and Columbia Rivers, to the discharge of the latter into the Pacific Ocean, where they arrived on the 14th of November 1805, and from whence they departed the 23rd day of March 1806 on their return to the United States by the same route they had come out.”
Presenting Fort Clatsop to Coboway, the most helpful of the Clatsop chiefs, the explorers started home in a brief spell of sunshine on March 23, 1806.
As they made their way up the Columbia River, they passed tribe after tribe of the same Indians they had met going downriver the previous year, and most were friendly and hospitable and ready to sell roots, fish, or other food, but often at prices too high for the expedition.
On April 1, they met Indians who said they lived at the rapids near the Great Falls, who had come down hoping to find food in the valley because their store of pounded salmon had run out. The news was a blow to the captains, who had planned to buy enough of the dried fish at the rapids to carry them through to the Nez Percé country.
To solve the problem, hunters went out to shoot elk and deer while the men in camp set up scaffolds to dry the meat they brought back.
While Lewis supervised the camp, Clark and a small party spent two days exploring the river that emptied into the Columbia some 140 miles from the ocean. The Indians called it the Multnomah; it has since been rechristened the Willamette.
With his usual resourcefulness, Clark managed to coax an Indian family into giving him some food by doing a little “magic.” First, he made their campfire crackle and change color by throwing in some “port fire match” - a kind of slow-burning artillery fuse. Then he pulled a compass out of his pocket, and using the magnet in the top of his portable inkstand, “turned the needle of the compas about very briskly; which astonished and alarmed these nativs.” Imploring him to “take out the bad fire,” they piled bundles of roots at his feet, and Clark stopped whirling the needle just as the flames returned to normal. The frightened Indians “took shelter in their [beds],” but when Clark paid them a fair price for their roots, they were “somewha
t passified.”
The captain had also gained a reputation among the tribes as a healer. Clark had developed a skill for administering medicine and natural remedies, which he now leveraged for needed supplies. “Last fall . . . Capt. C. gave an Indian man some . . . liniment to rub his knee and thye for a pain,” recorded Lewis. “The fellow soon after recovered and has never ceased to extol the virtues of our medicines and the skill of my friend Capt. C. as a physician. . . . In our present situation I think it pardonable to continue this deseption for they will not give us any provision without compensation. . . . We had several applications to assist their sick, which we refused unless they would let us have some dogs or horses to eat.” Clark’s remedy for one Indian girl suffering from “rhumitism” was to bathe her “in w[a]rm water and [anoint] her with a little balsom [resin].” Some days, as many as forty Indians lined up to trade food for Clark’s treatments.
Four days later, they were on their way again, with enough dried meat to take them to the Nez Percé villages. On April 9, the party reached the end of tidewater, and the next day, the painful fight against rapids began. As they progressed, however, they were able to buy horses from Indians along the way, and either cut up their canoes for fuel or sold them. By the time they reached the Great Falls of the Columbia, only two small canoes remained to be portaged around the falls; the rest of their baggage was on nine horses they had obtained, and a tenth carried William Bratton, who had been suffering all winter from mysterious pains in his back and was no longer able to walk.
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