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Fort Clatsop, The
Great Adventure
Architect Richard Thornton is a member of an alliance of Creek, Choctaw and
Seminole scholars, who over the past seven years have been intensely studying
the heritage of the Muskogean peoples. Much of their activities have involved
re-examination of the archives of the early Spanish, English and French
exploration of the Southeastern United States. We have asked Richard to provide
AccessGenealogy with some of his work. As we add to these articles we will
also be providing a question and answer section for the reader to ask questions
of Richard.
The Great
Adventure
With the purchase of the Province of Louisiana in 1803,
the young United States had instantaneously become one
of the largest nations on Earth. However, neither the
leaders of the United States, France or Spain had any
clue what existed in the far reaches of this territory.
No European had traveled the full breadth of the
province and returned to tell about it.
President Thomas Jefferson created a special military
unit, under the command of fellow Virginian, Major
Meriwether Lewis. Lewis chose as his second-in-command,
HIS former commander, Captain William Clark. Clark never
officially received his promotion from Lieutenant to
Captain before heading west. That was kept a secret from
the men. They always addressed him as “Captain Clark.”
What appears to have been an impossible military command
situation, worked out well. The two were close friends
and shared responsibility for their men. There were
originally 31 members in the specially trained unit.
Most were already enlisted in the U. S. Army. Major
Lewis and Captain Clark did outstanding jobs while in
command, and are role models that all officers should
study. While traveling over 4000 miles, they lost only
one member of the party – to appendicitis. They treated
all indigenous peoples with respect. On the few
occasions when military action was threatened against
the unit by native peoples, the officers displayed
sufficient force to show their strength, but did not
over-react to cause and “incident.”
The President’s instructions to the Corps were: “You are
to explore the Missouri River and such principal stream
of it as by its course and communication with the waters
of the Pacific Ocean, whether the Columbia, Oregon,
Colorado or any other river that may offer the most
direct and practicable water communication across this
continent for the purpose of commerce".
The boats of the Corps of Discovery left their base near
Saint Louis, Missouri on May 14, 1804. It took them five
months to paddle 1,600 miles up the Missouri River. They
spent the winter at Fort Mandan. It was here that they
hired a French-Canadian trader, named Toussaint
Charbonneau, as an interpreter. He was accompanied by
his young Shoshone wife, Sacagawea and their infant son,
Jean Baptiste.
After the ice jams melted in April of 1805, the
expedition continued paddling upstream. Once the little
boats entered the Rocky Mountains, Lewis & Clark were
not sure WHICH river at a fork was the main channel of
the Missouri. Remember there were no maps of this
region. They had no way of knowing where the Missouri
originated and had to rely on intelligence from friendly
Native American villages.
Sacagawea’s people traded horses and supplied a guide
for the journey over the Continental Divide. Near the
source of the Missouri, rapids, waterfalls and
obstructions made further travel by boat or canoe
impossible. Once on the other side of the Divide, Major
Lewis traded the horses for Native American dug out
canoes. The expedition then paddled downstream for 600
miles on the Clearwater, Snake and Columbia Rivers,
before finally sighting an estuary of the Pacific Ocean.
The expedition was tied down by Pacific storms for 10
days before deciding to cross the Columbia River to its
south side. They had been told that elk were plentiful
there. On December 10, 1805, construction began on a
small fort approximately two miles up the Netul River
from its confluence with the Columbia. Even though there
was still no roof, they moved in two days before
Christmas. The fort was named in honor of a friend
Native American tribe that owned the lands upon which
the fort sat.
Fort Clatsop
Fort Clatsop was more of a defensive residential
structure to keep bears, cougars and wolves out, than
really a facility designed to fight battles. It was a
crude lot structure consisting of two barracks joined by
a mews (courtyard.) The courtyard was walled on each end
by logs. Crude doors made from hand split planks
provided egress from the mews. Each barracks was heated
by crude log chimneys sealed with clay. Presumably, the
hearths of the chimneys were fieldstones mortared with
clay. Apparently, the expedition roofed the structures
with hand-split cedar planks; in a manner similar to
Native American houses.
The expedition had little social contact with their
temporary neighbors, but did trade with them on 24 days.
The men were starved for red meat, even though the
rivers nearby teamed with salmon. The locals traded
almost all of their “meat dogs” to the expedition in
return for manufactured items that the Natives thought
to be infinitely more valuable.
The Clatsop Indians had been trading with intermittently
visiting ships for several decades. They were not
interested in trinkets and knew a good bargain, when
they saw one. Basically, the attitude of the locals was
“Y’all come back any time . . . and bring more of those
steel knives, hatches and muskets. We will have plenty
more of those fat little puppies ready to trade . . .
suckers!"
The expedition occupied the fort for three months, then,
on March 23, 1806 headed back up the Columbia, In July,
the officers intentionally divided the unit in half so
they could explore as much territory as possible. The
two parties met each other on the Missouri River at the
mouth of the Yellowstone River on August 12, 1806. The
expedition reached Saint Louis on September 23, 1806.
Wouldn’t you have loved to have been on that expedition?
The route of the Corps of Discovery is now the
Lewis and
Clark National Historic Trail. The region around the
mouth of the Columbia River where the Corps spent the
winter of 1805-1806 is now preserved as the
Lewis and
Clark National Historic Park. It is a unit of the
National Park Service. Read
Journals of Lewis and Clark.
Notes About this Material
Source: Richard Thornton, an alliance of Muskogean scholars, professors and
professionals. Copyright Richard Thornton, Blairsville, GA, 2010. Used here with
permission.
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