Fort Clatsop: One Hundred Seven Days of Rain and Rot
Near Cannon Beach, Oregon
They arrived at the Pacific Coast on November fifteenth, eighteen oh five, and almost immediately wished they had not. The journals for the following weeks record steady rain, spoiled meat, fleas, dysentery, and the particular misery of having come four thousand miles only to spend the winter in a fourteen-by-fifty-foot log structure that was never going to be warm enough.
The Corps of Discovery built Fort Clatsop on the south bank of the Netul River, near present-day Astoria, and occupied it from December seventh, eighteen oh five to March twenty-third, eighteen oh six: one hundred seven days. Of those, it rained on all but twelve.
Lewis and Clark had intended to winter at the coast because they hoped to encounter a supply ship that could ease their return journey. No ship came. They ate elk, when they could get it. They ate dogs, purchased from the Clatsop and Shoalwater Bay Chinook people who lived nearby. When the elk was not fresh, they ate it anyway. Clark recorded the smell. Lewis recorded the fleas in clinical detail.
What they also produced, in that rain-soaked fort, was the most meticulous weather record kept by any American expedition to that point. The journals from Fort Clatsop contain daily temperature readings, precipitation notes, wind observations, and astronomical measurements. Lewis wrote natural-history descriptions of dozens of Pacific Northwest species that no American scientist had previously documented. The scientific output of four months of misery was substantial.
On March twenty-third, eighteen oh six, unable to wait any longer for a ship that was not coming, the expedition left for home. As a parting gift, Lewis gave Fort Clatsop to Coboway, the Clatsop chief who had helped them through the winter. The replica you see here is a reconstruction; the original decayed into the ground within a generation of the expedition's departure.
