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Winter Quarters: Fort Clatsop
The Lewis and Clark expedition was as extraordinary in its
day as the Apollo 11 moon landing more than a century and
a half later.

A 1955 community-built replica of Fort Clatsop commemorates the 1805-06 winter encampment of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
Set low in a huddle of pines, Fort Clatsop is basically two log cabins hitched together by short palisades. The people who bunked in its seven rooms during the winter of 1805-06 described it as a place where they endured contagions, fleas, and near-incessant rain. Yet Fort Clatsop looms large in American history. For it was on this windy bluff in northwestern Oregon that Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and the Corps of Discovery made their farthest camp during an expedition that helped open the West.

President Thomas Jefferson hoped the Corps would greatly expand knowledge of the Louisiana Purchase—the 800,000 square miles he'd recently bought from France—and challenge British influence over the fur-rich Northwest. He directed the Corps to navigate the Missouri River to its source, find the most direct route from there to the Pacific Ocean, and along the way learn about local Indian tribes.



In 1955 Fort Clatsop was recreated using a floor plan drawn on the cover of Clark's field book.
The 45-man Corps embarked on the Missouri River near St. Louis on May 14, 1804. In October they reached present-day North Dakota, where they built winter quarters and hired an interpreter: French fur trader Toussaint Charbonneau, who joined the expedition with his young Shoshone wife, Sacajawea, and their infant son. The following April they continued west, reaching the Pacific in November 1805. "Ocean in view! O! the joy!" Clark wrote in his journal.

By Christmas they'd erected a crude compound on the Netul River (now the Lewis and Clark River) and named the compound for a local tribe, the Clatsops. Until March 1806, Clark wrote in his journal, the party "lived as well as we had a right to expect," dining often on spoiled meat. Then they headed back to St. Louis, completing a journey of some 8,000 miles that did much to fill in the maps of North America and incite westward expansion of the United States.

In 1955 Fort Clatsop was recreated using a floor plan drawn on the cover of Clark's field book. It is now part of the 125-acre Fort Clatsop National Memorial, six miles southwest of Astoria on US Bus. 101, (503) 861-2471. It's open daily. Hours vary seasonally and ther is an admission charge. The website is www.nps.gov/focl. For travel information, contact the Astoria Chamber of Commerce, (503) 325-6311.


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Photo: National Park Service
Image: Photo: National Park Service