Chapter 23
The Great Fish
Tillamook Head and Ecola Creek, present-day Cannon Beach, Oregon
Yes. In January 1806 a whale washed up on the Oregon coast near present-day Cannon Beach. Clark went to see it with a small party that included Sacagawea, who insisted on going. By the time they arrived, the Tillamook people had stripped it down to a skeleton 105 feet long, and Clark traded for about three hundred pounds of blubber.
5 January 1806
When the salt-makers come back to the fort on 5 January, they bring something unexpected: a chunk of whale blubber. The Tillamook people who live down the coast have told them that a whale has washed up on the beach near one of their villages.
Lewis has a piece cooked. He finds it “very pallitable and tender,” and writes that “it resembled the beaver or the dog in flavour.” After weeks of rotten elk, it tastes wonderful. The captains decide to send a party to get more.
6 January 1806
Clark will lead it, with a small party of men. Sacagawea asks to go too, and keeps asking until the captains agree.
Lewis writes that “she observed that she had traveled a long way with us to see the great waters, and that now that monstrous fish was also to be seen, she thought it very hard she could not be permitted to see either (she had never yet been to the Ocean).”
It is one of the very few times the journals record Sacagawea asking for something for herself. She has travelled about 2,500 miles with the Corps, and she has not yet seen the sea.
7 January 1806
The way south runs over a huge headland, Tillamook Head, that rises straight out of the ocean. The trail climbs steeply through thick, dripping forest.
At the top, the trees open out and Clark stops. “From this point,” he writes, “I beheld the grandest and most pleasing prospects which my eyes ever surveyed, in my frount a boundless Ocean.” To the south, the waves break white against rocks and islands along miles of sandy beach.
8 January 1806
When they reach the whale, there is not much left. The Tillamook have already taken every useful part. Clark writes that the whale “was already pillaged of every Valuable part” and that the skeleton “measured 105 feet.” He names the stream nearby “E co-la or Whale Creek”; ecola is the word for whale in the trade language of the coast.
The Tillamook are busy boiling the blubber for oil in big wooden troughs, dropping in hot stones to heat the water. They drive a hard bargain, but Clark manages to buy about three hundred pounds of blubber and a few gallons of oil.
He is delighted: “Small as this stock is I prise it highly; and thank providence for directing the whale to us; and think him much more kind to us than he was to jonah, having Sent this Monster to be Swallowed by us in Sted of Swallowing of us as Jonah’s did.”
That night
That night Hugh McNeal goes off alone to a Tillamook lodge, where a man has invited him in to eat. A Chinook woman who knows McNeal realises the man is planning to kill him for his blanket and his few belongings. She grabs McNeal by his blanket to stop him, and when he pulls free, she runs out shouting a warning. His “pretended friend,” as Clark calls him, disappears into the dark, and McNeal gets back to camp safely.
Winter 1806
Back at the fort, the days settle into a routine. Hunters go out in the rain to shoot elk, which is the Corps’ main food all winter. Others scrape and tan the hides and sew them into new clothes and hundreds of pairs of moccasins for the journey home.
Clark spends the winter drawing maps. For the first time, anyone can see the whole route from St. Louis to the Pacific on paper, and how wrong the old maps of the West were.
Lewis writes. Day after day, he fills his notebooks with careful descriptions of plants, birds, fish and animals: the huge condor, the Pacific salmon and trout, the sea otter, the mountain beaver, trees and berries and ferns. Many of them have never been described by a scientist before.
24–25 February 1806
In late February the Clatsop bring a new kind of fish to the fort: a small, silvery fish that swims up the rivers in enormous numbers, so full of oil that, dried, it can be burned like a candle. The traders call it a candlefish.
Lewis draws one in his journal. He writes that the Clatsop cook them “by roasting a number of them together on a wooden spit,” and that “they are so fat they require no additional sauce, and I think them superior to any fish I ever tasted.”