Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
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February/March 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 1
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 1
In a crude log bunk room in the midst of a dense forest in Oregon, the afternoon light is dim and greenish. Outside, the rain pounds down, and with only a slice of window cut into the wall and a small open doorway, the room fills quickly with smoke from the fire on the hearth. Any traveler prefers sun to rain, but on this occasion a visitor to the reconstruction of Lewis and Clark’s winter campground found the downpour entirely suitable. ”… rained all the last night,” wrote William Clark of the place he and Meriwether Lewis named Fort Clatsop. “We covered our selves well as we could with Elk skin & set up the greater part of the night, all wet I lay in the wet verry cold.” In the diaries of the two explorers there are many moans about the weather; out of the 106 days they spent here in 1805 and 1806, they saw only 12 dry days. Fort Clatsop is one of several stops on an eight-day journey I took last April aboard a sturdy little vessel called the Sea Lion . We traveled the Columbia and Snake rivers round trip from Portland on a nine-hundred-mile cruise that is billed “In the Wake of Lewis and Clark.” By the end of the week passengers would see how far we had traveled from the realm of these early explorers and how the inheritors of Lewis and Clark had completely transformed that world. The fifty-four passengers (when full the boat holds seventy) all turned out to be eager amateur historians. Most had dipped into the reading list provided ahead of time by Special Expeditions, which runs these cruises in the spring and fall. While reading up on the Lewis and Clark expedition, known officially as the Corps of Volunteers for Northwest Discovery, I reaffirmed an early affection for them. For me their appeal lies partly in the sheer romance of their mission. “We were now about to penetrate a country at least 2000 miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man had never trodden,” wrote Lewis, the corps leader. Just as pleasing is the almost Hollywood-cast diversity of the group: the two chief adventurers with their sympathetic courtesy toward each other and their men; the Indian woman Sacagawea, who came along as the wife of their guide, Toussaint Charbonneau, and who proved far more useful than that feckless Frenchman. She carried her infant, Baptiste, and Clark, who came to dote on him, later raised the boy and saw that he was educated. Too, there was the powerful black slave York, whom Clark always carefully referred to as “my servant.” Completing the party was Scannon, a huge Newfoundland that hunted for his masters’ supper and guarded their camps. The journey of 7,689 miles and two and a half years saw close calls and near misses, yet all but