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We figured it would be silly to be so close to the end of the Lewis and Clark Trail without visiting it. During our summer travels in 2006, we followed part of the Corps of Discovery route from Portland east into Montana. Our interest in their amazing journey had been roused by the celebration of the 200th anniversary of their trip.

We left the Portland area on Highway 30 which follows along the southern bank of the Columbia River. At 1,243 miles, it is the longest river in the Pacific Northwest. The river had long been valued by native peoples who used it for transport and as a source of food. It was the river’s potential transportation possibilities that caused four countries to claim it as their own.

In 1513, when the Spanish explorer Balboa reached the Pacific Ocean in Panama, he not only claimed the entire ocean for Spain but all the land that touched it. That’s a mighty big claim. Spain did little to enforce their claim to the northern coast of the American continent. Their settlements were concentrated in what is now Mexico and the American Southwest. By the mid-1700s word reached Spain that Russian fur traders were invading their “territory.” In 1775 Spain sent Bruno de Heceta north to survey the area and report on the activities of the Russians. It was during that voyage that the mouth of the Columbia River was sighted and first officially recorded in history. A skirmish further north along the Washington coast left Heceta short-handed and he was unable to explore of the river. His name for the area didn’t stick, though Heceta Head in Oregon is named after him.

I must interject here that I have very little information about Russian activities in the area. I would imagine that with the amount of time they spent plying those coastal waters, they probably sighted the mouth of the great river. It seems they were content to collect their furs and leave—apparently they did not harbor the same dynastic, empire building desires as other countries.

The next information on the area came from the British fur trader Captain John Meares in 1788. He failed to explore the opening, and dismissed it as a small bay—yet another example of his dubious abilities. It seems that if Meares did anything right it was by accident; take for example his involvement in the Nootka Crisis. In 1788 Meares supposedly bought some land from a neighboring tribe and established a small trading post along Nootka Sound. A year later a Spanish voyage arrived and seized Meares’s property based on their prior claim to the area. Meares, who was in China, sent a fabulous account back to Britain and the two countries began preparing for war. Battle was averted by other more pressing issues in the world, and the two countries began a series of negotiations. The negotiations took forever; in 1794 the agreement which allowed both countries access to the area, yet effectively ended Spanish presence, was finally signed.

Meanwhile, in April 1792 Royal Navy captain George Vancouver also neglected to explore the opening, accepting Meares’s description of it. A few weeks later Vancouver scoffed at American captain Robert Gray when Gray claimed he had sighted a mighty river entrance. Vancouver quickly changed his tune when he learned that the American successfully sailed up the river in May of that same year and named it the Columbia. Unfortunately for the United States, Gray failed to claim the river for his country; he was a merchant captain, not a military one. Vancouver immediately dispatched a ship to the area. By October, Lieutenant William Robert Broughton had sailed upriver and claimed the entire watershed for Britain. The river was an exciting discovery as leading thought at the time held that it was the Northwest Passage, a rumored navigable waterway between the Atlantic and Pacific.

Here’s where things start to heat up for the Americans. With Russia and Spain essentially out of the picture, Britain and the United States were left to compete for Oregon Country. Ownership of the land became increasingly important to the young nation after the buying the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803. The purchase—which included the Mississippi River and all the land drained by it—more than doubled the size of the U.S. More importantly, if the rumor of the Northwest Passage was true, it meant access to both oceans and a huge advantage in the busy trade routes. This is a good time to stop and remember that the land that Napoleon Bonaparte sold to the U.S. was already “owned” and occupied by a great many native people.

A few weeks after signing the deal, President Thomas Jefferson organized a reconnaissance team to explore the recently acquired area. Jefferson appointed his private secretary and military man, Captain Meriwether Lewis to head the Corps of Discovery expedition. Lewis felt a co-commander would be needed and he selected a fellow Army man, William Clark. The Corps was to travel up the Missouri River and hopefully find a water route to the Pacific. Along the way the Corps was charged with studying the tribes, terrain, plants, and wildlife, surveying and mapping the region as well as documenting the presence of British and French Canadians.

It was a monumental task and the two men wasted no time gathering supplies, planning the trip, and hiring men. At a spot near St. Louis, a winter camp was established and men tried out for the positions. The Corps was run as a military unit and many of the men who applied for the job were passed over in favor of men who were better hunters, who had frontier experience, or even skills with native tongues. Though maps were gathered from as many sources as possible (like Broughton’s map of the Columbia) and the Captains spent much time gleaning information from fur traders, there was still a huge blank spot in the center of the Corps’ route.

In May of 1804, the Corps began their long struggle up the Missouri River. The going was slow: they were heavily laden with survey equipment, food, supplies, and trade goods including beads, tobacco, ribbon, peace medals, and a hundred gallons of whiskey. The speed of the trip allowed Lewis and Clark plenty of time to take measurements, record observations, and collect samples. In October, the expedition settled in for the winter at Fort Mandan in present day North Dakota, a small fort that they built near a friendly Mandan village. While there, Lewis and Clark hired Toussaint Charbonneau, as translator and guide. Charbonneau’s young Shoshone wife Sacagawea and their infant son also accompanied the Corps.

Bringing the native mother and child on the journey proved to be a stroke of brilliance, for not only did Sacagawea serve as a translator and guide in the area near her birth, but their presence assured some of the tribes that the Corps was not a war party. I interrupt this story to share a small event with you. According to their journals, in July of 1805 Private Alexander Hamilton Willard was attacked by a white bear. When I first read that, I assumed that Clark meant a Grizzly Bear (Ursus arctos horribilis), an animal that can look whitish or silvery, and that was new to the Corps. After a bit of digging I learned that there really are white bears in the lower 48 states, called Kermode Bears (Ursus americanus kermodei). The bears, a subspecies of the American Black Bear, have white or cream-colored fur as a result of a recessive gene. I have seen quite a few bears, both Grizzly and Black, in the wild and they are amazing—but it would be incredible to see a Kermode Bear.

After an arduous crossing of the Rocky Mountains by foot and horseback, the Corps arrived at the Columbia River. Using dugout canoes that they crafted with help from the local natives, the Corps made swift progress down the river to the ocean. Early in December the Corp’s thirty-three members (and Clark’s Newfoundland dog, Seaman) neared the Pacific Ocean. On Christmas day they moved into the winter camp that they had just built, Fort Clatsop. They named the fort after a friendly nearby tribe; the name roughly means “the dried salmon people.”

The fort was located on a hill a few miles inland from the Pacific Ocean near the Netul River. The Corps selected the site so as to be safe from floods, close to elk for hunting, near the ocean for salt making, and with access to the Columbia so they could trade with any incoming ships. The 106 days the Corps lived at the fort were busy ones. The Captains worked on their journals and maps, making extra copies of most everything, a small group of men was dispatched to the ocean to boil salt from the water, others were sent out hunting, and still others stood guard all the while preparing for the return trip by crafting clothing and extra moccasins from animal hides. It was a cold and miserable winter: a mere twelve days weren’t rainy, and the sun only shone on seven.

Before the end of March 1806 the Corps headed back east. In late September the Corps safely returned to St. Louis. They had traveled over 8,000 miles, much of it through unknown territory. Not only did they bring back a wealth of information about the rest of the continent: maps of the major rivers and mountains, close to 200 species of plants, over 100 species of animals, but they had also established official contacts with many of the native people. The country’s disappointment over the lack of a Northwest Passage was forgotten in the excitement over their journey. Between the two of them, Lewis and Clark brought back over a million words of detail. The men’s spelling was abysmal—Lewis’ spelling was called “imaginative” while Clark spelled Sioux twenty-seven different ways in his journals—but the content inspired the country.

Though citizens were fascinated by the western lands, the U.S. did not own anything west of the Rocky Mountains, and the British felt the young country had no legal claims to the area. The British had a strong presence in Oregon Country through the Hudson’s Bay Company which had established several trading posts. In 1810, American John Jacob Astor, one of the largest shareholders in the Pacific Fur Company, financed an expedition to Oregon Country to establish a fur trading fort. Two parties were sent: one by land from St. Louis, and one by sea. The ship Tonquin arrived in March of 1811 and a small fort was built by May. When the overland contingent arrived in February of 1812, they found Fort Astoria to be a tiny, thriving village.

The outpost was the first permanent American settlement on the West Coast, but it didn’t last for long. Various failures in their supply chain and the outbreak of the War of 1812 forced the Pacific Fur Company to leave Fort Astoria. Here the story gets a little confusing; some claim the fort was sold to a British fur company, the British military claimed it captured the fort, while others claimed the fort had been abandoned. Astor, never one to miss an opportunity, demanded at the end of the War that he be reimbursed by Britain. In 1835, Astor even hired the very popular Washington Irving to write a story—aptly titled Astoria—about the short lived settlement. Talk about a marketing campaign, he didn’t even have a product, just the memory of one. Apparently, it worked, for Astor went down in history as the first millionaire in the U.S.

In 1818, the U.S. and Britain signed the Anglo-American Convention which wrapped up some unfinished business from the 1814 Treaty of Ghent and set up joint occupancy rights to the Oregon Country. Britain still felt pretty confident that their hold on the Northwest was undeniable. But the U.S. was just as confident that they had “prior discovery” rights from Gray’s 1792 trip, and an “effective settlement” claim with Fort Astoria. In 1819 the U.S. further strengthened their claim by purchasing Spain’s rights to the area. Eventually, the territorial dispute was resolved by the flood of American settlers pouring into Oregon Country. By 1845 Manifest Destiny was a common headline, with many citizens sharing the view that the continent should belong to the U.S. In 1846, the Oregon Treaty was signed, establishing the 49th parallel as the U.S. and Canada border.

We began our visit at Fort Clatsop, one of twelve sites in the Lewis and Clark National Historical Park. After watching a brief movie about the Corps of Discovery, we wandered out to tour the fort. The Corps left behind very few artifacts, and the fort had long since succumbed to the wet weather, so the small fort that we saw was reconstructed based on sketches and information from Captain Clark’s journal. It was such a small place for thirty-three people—only 50’ long and 50’ wide. The Captains shared the largest room, Charbonneau, Sacagawea and their son Pomp had a small room, a sergeant and Clark’s slave York shared another tiny room. The three rooms across the Parade Grounds were shared by the remaining 26 men. The Captains’ journals record how miserable they all were from the cold, damp weather and the fleas that lived at the fort with them. Imagine what the place must have smelled like! Our day was warm and sunny, salal berries and elderberries were ripening, flowers were brightly blooming, and the wind was a mere rustle—the complete opposite of the Corps’ experience.

While at the fort we were disappointed to learn that the expedition’s saltworks site had been discovered in Seaside and was open to the public as part of the Park. We had recently visited Seaside and other than the End of the Trail statue we hadn’t heard about any other Lewis and Clark related sites there. It would have been neat to visit since during the summer they have re-enactors who camp at the saltworks and boil sea water all weekend. Oh well, there is always next time.

After the fort we stopped and explored the waterfront of Astoria, a town of roughly 10,000. Just inland from the Pacific Ocean along the Columbia River, Astoria’s story began with the river and is still focused on the waterway. The river is a major shipping lane for cargo. Though Astoria’s small port handles little of that traffic, its river pilots and tug boats are kept busy guiding the huge ships past the Columbia Bar. The bar has confounded sailors for centuries, causing the wreckage of hundreds of ships. There is a reason they call it the Graveyard of the Pacific.

The town surprised us, what we thought might be a sleepy little hamlet that time forgot was actually a fairly vibrant, international community. As we walked along the waterfront we saw a small Bosnian restaurant and we learned of the area’s early Scandinavian fishing families and the Chinese families who worked in Astoria’s many canneries. Astoria is still home to a small fishing fleet and several packing plants. As we strolled along, we passed a warehouse that was processing fresh-caught sardines. Seeing all that fish made us hungry so we stopped in at the Wet Dog Cafe, home of the Astoria Brewing Company. While waiting for dinner, I flipped through a local paper and came across an ad for a Handmade Hoola-Hoop shop. Now that’s a cool town!

Photos: View our photographs from Astoria, Fort Clatsop, and the Columbia River.

Dates: We visited Astoria, Oregon on 07/11/08.