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18 Days in Pacific County, Washington |
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Two years and 4,100 miles of travel up the Missouri, over the Rockies and down the Columbia River later, Lewis and Clark finally arrived within view of the Pacific Ocean. This epic journey, which still captures the imagination of contemporary Americans, reached its goal on the shore of what is now known as the Long Beach Peninsula in Pacific County, Washington. There, Captain Clark and a number of his men walked along a sandy beach of the “great Pacific Ocean we been so long anxious to see.” The perilous Columbia River, coupled with pounding rain, had kept the men from reaching the salty sea for several days. Its turbulence, particularly in winter, was compounded when it met up with the ocean. Here at the confluence, the resulting froth and waves made it extremely perilous. It would be 40 years before the label ‘Graveyard of the Pacific’ was applied to the waters these explorers had reached on foot. Yet the Columbia River – the largest river on the Pacific Coast of the United States – had first been noted as far back as 1570 when Ortelius recorded its place on a map. In 1805, when the Lewis and Clark party encountered both the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean, there was already a fair amount of sea trade being conducted by the Chinookan native people with ships of many countries. To reach this northwest coast, ships often took long journeys below the African continent. The dream of dominating northwest coast sea trade was not a new one for President Jefferson. Twenty years before he commissioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to traverse the continent, he had asked John Ledyard, a well-known adventurer, to try to find a land route to the sea. At the time, Ledyard’s destination was to be approached via Siberia on a walking trek through Alaska and then south to the coast. Despite the fact that this ambitious journey was cut short, Jefferson and others remained convinced that developing shorter and faster access to the riches of the northwest coast would mean be a financial boon. The convergence of the river and the Pacific Ocean, however, was always difficult for vessels to traverse. In 1792, Captain Robert Gray had attempted – unsuccessfully - to cross the bar with its shifting shoals but found the current flowing from the river into the ocean to be too rapid and treacherous. James Gibbs, author of Pacific Graveyard, (1964, Binfords & Mort), asserts that these waters became known as the ‘Graveyard of the Pacific’ during the Gold Rush. Between 1849 and 1963, Gibbs records 234 shipwrecks in the area, including wrecks northward along the Long Beach Peninsula’s 28 miles to the mouth of Willapa Bay. Comprehensive detailing, including the often heroic stories of these events, is contained in Gibbs’ book. Today, two lighthouses, Cape Disappointment and North Head, stand as testament to the dangers of the regions' waters. Those waters remain so strong and treacherous that they provide the perfect training ground for students attending the US Coast Guard’s Lifeboat School. Established as a lifesaving station in 1878, this Coast Guard Station’s personnel and rescue equipment have been instrumental in many dramatic sea rescues, not without the occasional loss of its own brave crews in such efforts. (Extensive information about this critical resource can be found at: http://www.uscg.mil/d13/units/gruastoria/sta-cape-d/default.htm) When Lieutenant C. Wilkes, USN, arrived in the area in 1841, he noted: “…Mere description can give little idea of the terrors of the bar of the Columbia: all who have seen it have spoken of the wildness of the scene, and the incessant roar of the waters, representing it as one of the most fearful sights that can possibly meet the eye of the sailor.” During the 18 days the Corps of Discovery spent on the shores of these two volatile bodies of water, they spent a great deal of their time exploring the area, meeting with local Chinookan people, and trying to decide whether or not they could survive the winter by attempting to cross the Columbia River in hopes of finding a more hospitable environment to the immediate south. Their adventures, chronicled in these pages, tell the tale of a confluence of rivers and cultures at the culmination of this westward journey. |
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