Part V · Down the Columbia
Chapter 19
The Great River
The Snake and Columbia rivers, present-day Idaho, Washington and Oregon
From the Nez Perce country the Corps paddled down the Clearwater and Snake rivers to the Columbia, which they reached on 16 October 1805, then ran the rapids of Celilo Falls and the Dalles on the way to the Pacific. The Columbia was lined with fishing villages and was one of the great trading routes of North America.
7–10 October 1805
Going downstream is fast, and dangerous. The Clearwater is full of rapids, and the men, eager to make up for lost time, run most of them instead of carrying the canoes around. On 8 October one canoe hits a rock, swings round and sinks. Several of the men in it cannot swim. They cling to the wreck until the others rescue them.
On 10 October the Clearwater joins a bigger river, the Snake. The two towns that stand where they meet today are called Lewiston and Clarkston.
16–18 October 1805
On 16 October the Snake pours into a river so wide that it takes their breath away. It is the Columbia, the great river of the West that Twisted Hair drew on his elk skin.
The Columbia is a river of salmon. Everywhere there are villages of mat lodges, and racks of fish drying in the sun. The water is so clear that Clark can see salmon twenty feet down, and so many have died after spawning that he writes, “I must have seen 3 or 400 dead and maney living.”
On 18 October, far to the south-west, Clark sees “a mountain bearing S.W. conocal form covered with snow.” It is Mount Hood, which a British naval officer, sailing up the Columbia from the ocean, had named thirteen years earlier. For the first time, a place on their maps from the east matches a place on the maps from the west.
19 October 1805
On 19 October Clark goes ashore ahead of the canoes and shoots a crane. The people in a nearby village have never seen guns. They hear the shot, see the bird fall out of the sky, and hide in their houses, terrified. When Clark finally persuades them to come out and smoke with him, “they said we came from the clouds &c. &c. and were not men.”
What calms them is the sight of Sacagawea arriving in the canoes with her baby. Clark writes that “the wife of Shabono our interpreter we find reconsiles all the Indians, as to our friendly intentions a woman with a party of men is a token of peace.”
22–23 October 1805
Then the river narrows and drops. At Celilo Falls the whole Columbia pours over a series of rock shelves. For thousands of years it has been one of the greatest fishing places in North America. Men stand on wooden platforms over the roaring water and catch salmon with long-handled nets.
The Corps has to carry the canoes around the falls, and lower them down with ropes. Clark notes “great numbers of flees,” which get into their clothes and blankets and torment them for days. Here, and all the way down the river, they buy dogs to eat, because they find the dried fish does not agree with them.
24–25 October 1805
Below Celilo the river squeezes through a channel of black rock only a few dozen yards wide. The water boils. Clark climbs a rock to look at it and decides to go through anyway, “notwithstanding the horrid appearance of this agitated gut swelling, boiling & whorling in every direction.”
The people of the villages come out and line the cliffs to watch these strangers try it. Clark writes that “we passed safe to the astonishment of all the Ind[ians] of the last lodges who viewed us from the top of the rock.”
1–3 November 1805
At the Cascades, the Columbia tumbles through the mountains in another stretch of rapids, and the men carry the canoes again. Below it the river is calm, and the hills on either side are covered with huge dark forests of fir and cedar. It starts to rain, and it seems it will never stop.
On 2 November, near a great rock that stands alone by the water, Clark notices the river level rising and falling. It is the tide. The ocean is close.