XVIII Fort Clatsop by the Sea
December had now arrived, and southwest storms broke upon the coast with tremendous force. Off Cape Disappointment, the surges dashed to the height of the masthead of a ship, with most terrific roaring. A winter encampment could no longer be delayed.
“Deer, elk, good skin, good meat,” said the Chinook Indians, in pantomime, pointing across the bay to the south.
Accordingly, thither the eggshell boats were guided, across the tempestuous Columbia, to the little river Netul, now the Lewis and Clark, ten miles from the ocean.
Beside a spring branch, in a thick grove of lofty firs about two hundred yards from the water, the leather tent was set up and big fires built, while all hands fell to clearing a space for the winter cabins.
In four days the logs were rolled up, Boonsboro fashion, into shelters for the winter. “The foinest puncheons I iver saw,” said Patrick Gass, head carpenter, as he set to splitting boards out of the surrounding firs.
By Christmas seven cabins were covered and the floors laid. The chinks were filled with clay, and fir-log fires were set roaring in the capacious chimneys that filled an entire end of each cabin. On Christmas day they moved in, wet blankets and all, with rounds of firearms and Christmas salutes.
The leather tent, soaked for days, fell to pieces. The heavy canisters of powder, every one of which had been under the water in many a recent capsize, were consigned in safety to the powder-house.
On New Year’s Eve the palisades were done, and the gates were closed at sunset.
The first winter-home of civilised people on the Columbia has an abiding charm, not unlike that of Plymouth or Jamestown.
Back through the mists of one hundred years we see gangs of elk, chased by hunters through cranberry bogs, “that shook for the space of half an acre.”
Their soundless footfalls were lost in beds of brown pine needles and cushions of moss. The firing of guns reverberated through the dim gloom like a piece of ordnance.
It was from such a trip as this that the hunters returned on the 16th of December, reporting elk. All hands set to work carrying up the meat from the loaded boats, skinning and cutting and hanging it up in small pieces in the meathouse, to be smoked by a slow bark fire. But in spite of every precaution, the meat began to spoil.
“We must have salt,” said Captain Lewis.
In a few days, five men were dispatched with five kettles to build a cairn for the manufacture of salt from seawater.
Already Clark had examined the coast with this in view, and the salt-makers’ camp was established near Tillamook Head, about fifteen miles southwest of the fort where the old cairn stands to this day. Here the men built “a neat, close camp, convenient to wood, salt water and the fresh waters of the Clatsop River, within a hundred paces of the ocean,” and kept the kettles boiling day and night.
On that trip to the coast, while the cabins were building, Captain Clark visited the Clatsops, and purchased some rude household furniture, cranberries, mats, and the skin of a panther, seven feet from tip to tip, to cover their puncheon floor.
Other utensils were easily fashioned. Seated on puncheon stools, before the log-fire of the winter night, the men carved cedar cups, spoons, plates, and dreamed of homes across the continent.
In just such a little log cabin as this, Shannon saw his mother in Ohio woods; Patrick Gass pictured his father, with his pipe, at Wellsburg, West Virginia; Sergeant Ordway crossed again the familiar threshold at Hebron, New Hampshire. Clark recalled Mulberry Hill, and Lewis,—his mind was fixed on Charlottesville, or the walls expanded into Monticello and the White House.
“Mak’ some pleasurement now,” begged the Frenchmen, “w’en Bonhomme Cruzatte tune up hees fidelle for de dance.”
Tales were told and plans were made. Toward midnight these Sinbads of the forest fell asleep, on their beds of fir boughs, lulled by the brook, the whispering of the pines, and the falling of the winter rain.
This was not like winter rain in eastern climates, but soft and warm as April. The grass grew green, Spring flowers opened in December. The moist Japan wind gives Oregon the temperature of England.
“I most sincerely regret the loss of my thermometer,” said Lewis. “I am confident this climate is much milder than the same latitude on the Atlantic. I never experienced so warm a winter.”
But about the last of January there came a snow at Clatsop, four inches thick, and icicles hung from the houses during the day.
“A real touch of winter,” said Lewis. “The breath is perceptible in our room by the fire.” Like all Oregon snow it disappeared in a week—and then it was Spring.
In the centre of the officer’s cabin, a fir stump, sawed off smooth and flat for a table, was covered with maps and papers. Books were written in that winter of 1805-6, voluminous records of Oregon plants and trees, birds, beasts, and fishes. They had named rivers and measured mountains, and after wandering more than Homer’s heroes, the explorers were ready now to carry a new geography to the States. And here, as everywhere, Lewis was busy with his vocabularies, learning the Chinook jargon.
As never before, all the men became scientists. Even Captain Clark’s black man took an interest and reported some fabulous finds.
The houses were dry and comfortable, and within, they had a plentiful supply of elk and salt, “excellent, white, and fine, but not so strong as the rock salt, or that made in Kentucky.”
Meal time was always interesting. Very often the Captains caught themselves asking: “Charboneau, when will dinner be ready?”
All day the firelight flickered on Sacajawea’s hair, as she sat making moccasins, crooning a song in her soft Indian monotone. This was, perhaps, the happiest winter Sacajawea ever knew, with baby Touissant toddling around her on the puncheon floor, pulling her shawl around his chubby face, or tumbling over his own cradle. The modest Shoshone princess never dreamed how the presence of her child and herself gave a touch of domesticity to that Oregon winter.
Now and then Indian women came to see Sacajawea, sitting all day without a word, watching her every motion.
Sometimes Sacajawea helped Charboneau, with his spits, turning slowly before the fire, or with his elk’s tongues or sausage or beaver’s tails. Sometimes she made trapper’s butter, boiling up the marrow of the shank bones with a sprinkle of salt.
In the short days darkness came on at four o’clock, and the last of the candles were soon exhausted. Then the moulds were brought and candles were made of elk tallow, until a heap, shining and white, were ready for the winter evenings.
“We have had trouble enough with those thieving Chinooks,” said Captain Lewis. “Without a special permit, they are to be excluded from the fort.”
The Indians heard it. Did a knock resound at the gate, “No Chinook!” was the quick accompaniment.
“Who, then?” demanded the sentinel, gun in hand.
“Clatsop,” answered Coboway’s people entering with roots and cranberries.
Or, “Cathlamets,” answered an up-river tribe with rush bags of wapato on their backs. Roots of the edible thistle—white and crisp as a carrot, sweet as sugar, the roasted root of the fern, resembling the dough of wheat, and roots of licorice, varied the monotonous fare.
These supplies were very welcome, but the purchase money, that was the problem.
President Jefferson had given to Captain Lewis an unlimited letter of credit on the United States, but such a letter would not buy from these Indians even a bushel of wapato.
The Cathlamets would trade for fishhooks. The Clatsops preferred beads, knives, or an old file.
No wonder they valued an old file: the finest work of their beautiful canoes was often done with a chisel fashioned from an old file. Lewis and Clark had frequent occasion to admire their skill in managing these little boats, often out-riding the waves in the most tumultuous seas.
Ashore, these canoe-Indians waddled and rolled like tipsy sailors. Afloat, straight and trim as horse-Indians of the prairie, each deft Chinook glided to his seat along the unrocking boats, and striking up the paddlers’ “Ho-ha-ho-ha-ho-ha-” went rowing all their lives, until their arms grew long and strong, their legs shrunk short and crooked, and their heads became abnormally intelligent.
Nor were these coast Indians lacking in courage,—they sometimes ventured into the sea in their wonderful canoes, and harpooned the great whale and towed him in.
When it came to prices for their beautiful skins of sea-otter, almost nothing would do. Clark offered a watch, a handkerchief, an American dollar, and a bunch of red beads for a single skin.
“No! No!” in stentorian tone—“Tyee ka-mo-suck,—chief beads,”—the most common sort of large blue glass beads, the precious money of that country. Chiefs hung them on their bosoms, squaws bound them on their ankles, pretty maidens hung them in their hair. But Lewis and Clark had only a few and must reserve them for most pressing necessity.
Since that May morning when Captain Robert Gray discovered the Columbia River, fourteen years before, the Chinook Indians had learned the value of furs. Once they handed over their skins, and took without a murmur what the Boston skippers chose to give. Now, a hundred ships upon that shore had taught them craft.
One of old King Comcomly’s people had a robe of sea-otter, “the fur of which was the most beautiful we had ever seen.” In vain Lewis offered everything he had, nothing would purchase the treasured cloak but the belt of blue beads worn by Sacajawea.
On every hand among these coast tribes were blankets, sailor-clothes, guns,—old Revolutionary muskets mended for this trade,—powder and ball, the powder in little japanned tin flasks in which the traders sold it.
In what Clark calls “a guggling kind of language spoken mostly through the throat,” with much pantomime and some English, conversation was carried on.
“Who are these traders?” asked Captain Lewis.
Old Comcomly, King of the Chinooks, on the north side, and Tyee Coboway, Chief of the Clatsops, on the south bank of the Columbia, tried to remember, and counted on their fingers,—
“Haley, three masts, stays some time,” “Tallamon not a trader,” “Callalamet has a wooden leg,” “Davidson, no trader, hunts elk,” “Skelley, long time ago, only one eye.”
And then there were “Youens, Swipton, Mackey, Washington, Mesship, Jackson, Balch,” all traders with three-masted ships whose names are not identified by any Atlantic list.
The one translated Washington by Lewis and Clark may have been Ockington of the Belle Savage, 1801, or Tawnington, both of whom are known to have been on the coast in those years.
In fact, no complete record was ever kept of the ships that swarmed around the Horn and up the Pacific, in those infant years of our republic, 1787 to 1820. While Europe clustered around the theatre of Napoleonic wars, every harbour of New England had its fur ships and whalers out, flying the Stars and Stripes around the world.
“What do they say?” inquired Lewis, still pressing investigation. Proud of their acquirements, every Chinook and Clatsop in the nation could recall some word or phrase.
“Musket, powder, shot, knife, file, heave the lead, damned rascal!”
No wonder Lewis and Clark laughed, these mother words on the savage tongue were like voices out of the very deep, calling from the ships.
“One hyas tyee ship—great chief ship—Moore, four masts, three cows on board.”
“Which way did he go?”
The Indians pantomimed along the northwest coast.
“From which,” says Lewis, “I infer there must be settlements in that direction.”
The great desire, almost necessity, now, seemed to be to wait until some ship appeared upon the shore from which to replenish their almost exhausted stores.
Whenever the boats went in and out of Meriwether Bay they passed the Memeloose Illahee, the dead country of the Clatsops. Before 1800, as near as Lewis and Clark could ascertain, several hundred of the Clatsops died suddenly of a disease that appeared to be smallpox, the same undoubtedly that cut down Black Bird and his Omahas, rolling on west and north where the Hudson’s Bay traders traced it to the borders of the Arctic.
In Haley’s Bay one hundred canoes in one place bespoke the decimation of the Chinooks, all slumbering now in that almost priceless carved coffin, the Chinook canoe, with gifts around them and feet to the sunset, ready to drift on an unknown voyage.
There was a time when Indian campfires stretched from Walla Walla to the sea, when fortifications were erected, and when Indian flint factories supplied the weapons of countless warriors. But they are gone. The first settlers found sloughs and bayous lined with burial canoes, until the dead were more than the living. No Indians knew whose bones they were, “those old, old, old people.” Red children and white tumbled them out of the cedar coffins and carried away the dead men’s treasures.
“There was mourning along the rivers. A quietness came over the land.” Stone hammers, flint chips, and arrows lie under the forests, and embers of fires two centuries old.
The native tribes were disappearing before the white man came, and the destruction of property with the dead kept the survivors always impoverished.