Saturday, August 21, 2026
Having left the east coast on May 14, 1804, Lewis and Clark glided into the northern side of the mouth of the Columbia River in dugout canoes in early November 1805. With starved looks, tattered clothes rotting on their bodies, and disheveled hair, they neither had the energy nor wherewithal to moor. Clark named the spot Dismal Nitch.
A group of local Indians arrived in elegantly carved and painted canoes, communicating with a few words of English they had learned from fur traders.
The captains had intended to meet the last trading ship of the season on the Pacific to obtain badly needed supplies and send back journals and specimens of plants and animals to President Jefferson. But a severe winter storm prevented this. This is “the most disagreeable time I have ever experienced,” Clark wrote in his journal.
Finally on November 15 the weather calmed, and they were able to view the Pacific Ocean from the cliffs above the pounding surf. They had arrived at the western end of their voyage named Cape Disappointment some 17 years earlier when another captain had failed to cross the shallow sandbank in search of an entrance from Pacific to the Columbia River.
At the end of their westward journey Clark finally wrote, “O! What joy!”
They camped for a week, but no food was to be found. The Indians informed them that if they relocated to the southern side of the river, they would find plenty of elk to hunt. They moved their camp and in less than 20 days built a seven-room log cabin and named it, Fort Clatsop, where they spent the winter, eating elk for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and supplementing it with whale blubber, roots, fish, duck and beaver. They made salt from the ocean water to season their food, and fashioned clothes and moccasins from durable elk leather.
Using the slow-burning method, that Indians taught them, they built six dugout canoes from ponderosa pine and on March 23, 1806, they departed eastward for home.
We visited both Dismal Nitch and the cliffs of Cape Disappointment where a lighthouse is now located. I imagined seeing the land, the water, and the wilderness the way it was long before the country became the United States of America. Having experienced the pristine unspoiled open spaces and picturesque small towns, pride and tenderness spread through me that made me feel closer to the land of my adopted country.
