Lewis and Clark at the Columbia: The River Already Full of People
Near Cannon Beach, Oregon
When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark reached the Columbia River in late October of eighteen oh five, they had been traveling for eighteen months and had entered territory that no American exploring party had previously documented. What they found was not empty country.
The Columbia River corridor was one of the most densely occupied and intensively traded regions in North America. The Chinook peoples, whose villages extended from the coast to the Cascade Mountains, ran a trading economy that connected the Pacific shore to the Interior Plateau, linking coastal goods, salmon, and canoes with dried meat, horses, and tools from the interior. Multiple languages were spoken at trading sessions. There were established protocols for trade, for guest relations, for the exchange of information about conditions further along the river.
Lewis and Clark were not explorers entering a wilderness. They were travelers entering a well-organized commercial corridor and navigating it with the help of people who knew it far better than they did. The journals record Chinook traders they encountered, the prices and goods they offered, the canoes they admired, the fishing techniques they documented. The Corps of Discovery bought food from Chinook traders. They relied on Chinook knowledge of the river's mouth to navigate it safely.
What the journals also record is the demographic shadow of epidemic disease. Village sites they passed through showed signs of recent, catastrophic population loss. The Columbia River nations had already been struck by diseases introduced through the fur-trade networks before the first American expedition arrived. The river they traveled was already diminished from what it had been a generation earlier.
The fort they built at the river's mouth bears the expedition's name. The people who knew the river first are still waiting for the federal government to acknowledge them.
