Lewis and Clark's Worst Stretch: The Columbia Gorge Descent

By late October of eighteen oh five, the Corps of Discovery had already crossed the Continental Divide, survived winter on the Missouri, built dugout canoes on the Clearwater River with the help of the Nez Perce, and traveled hundreds of miles down the Snake River. They entered the Columbia at what is now the state of Washington and turned west. They were close.

The Columbia Gorge, even for men who had navigated rivers all year, was something else. The river narrows and steepens as it cuts through the Cascade Range. Class Four rapids stood between them and the Pacific. They did not portage around them. Clark's journals record that the captains made the decision to run the rapids in the dugout canoes, watched by hundreds of Chinook-speaking people on the banks who had come to observe what these strangers were doing. Clark wrote that he considered their survival through those rapids something close to miraculous.

They were not alone. At every significant rapid, Chinook-speaking peoples had established villages and trade centers. These communities already had metal axes, iron trade goods, and blue glass beads, evidence that European maritime traders had been moving up and down this coast for decades before Lewis and Clark arrived overland. The corps was not discovering an unknown river. They were following a commerce route that the Pacific world already knew.

The Nez Perce leader Twisted Hair had provided the canoe trees and supervised the building on the Clearwater. Without that knowledge, and without the pilots and guides who appeared at key points along the descent, the expedition would have lost far more than equipment in those rapids.

What Lewis and Clark found when they reached the Pacific was a coast that had already found the world. They just hadn't met it from that direction before.