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Undaunted Courage : Meriwether Lewis, Thomas The Truth About Sacajawea was instrumental in having Sacajawea chosen to be honored on the new circulating dollar coin. Senator Mike Enzi of Wyoming said, "Ken Thomasma's book is the textbook on Sacajawea. I used his book as my main reference in pushing for Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin, to decide in favor of puting Sacajawea on our new dollar coin."
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A visit to the winter encampment of explorers Lewis and Clark Life was dreary here for the Corps of Discovery By Chuck Woodbury
Story updated 2-25-02 ASTORIA, Ore. -- It's a cold, wet and otherwise dreary day for a visit to Fort Clatsop. But that's okay. For that's the way it was for 94 of the 106 days that explorers Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and their Corps of Discovery holed up here in the winter of 1805 and 1806. Nowadays, the fort is only a two-minute walk from a comfy Visitor Center, where you can remain dry while learning what it was like when it was the only non-Native American outpost in the present-day Pacific Northwest. Admission to Fort Clatsop National Memorial is a bargain at only $3 (or $5 per car- or RV-load). The Visitor Center with its mini-theater is adequate but not outstanding (although the half-hour movie is excellent). The star attraction is the fort itself, the temporary home away f
It’s not the real Fort Clatsop, though, but a replica built in 1955 from Clark’s sketches. If it’s not on the exact spot of the original fort, it’s close. A ranger told me that researchers are forever trying to pinpoint the exact location. Recently, evidence was unearthed that indicates an old wall may have existed underneath one corner of the replica fort. The original fort? Could be. Even though 200,000 people visit each year, I was the only one there for the hour I poked around in February. It was a chilly, misty morning
Sacajawea statue in Bismark, N.D. She was born between 1780-1790 in either Western Montana or eastern Idaho. A member of the Lemhi band of Shoshone Indians, she was kidnapped at age ten and later sold into slavery to a Canadian trapper named Toussaint Charbonneau. In 1804, Charbonneau signed on as an interpreter with the Corps of Discovery, bringing along Sacajawea, who, in 1805, gave birth to a baby boy, Jean-Baptiste, who she carried on her back. Sacajawea was a huge asset to the party, identifying plants and helping -- sometimes in a critical way, the explorers' relations with Indians they encountered. The very presence of Sacajawea and her child was interpreted by some Indians as a "token of peace." Sacajawea’s son Jean Baptiste, lived to age 61 and became quite a well traveled man. After Sacajawea’s death at age 25, William Clark adopted and raised the boy. Eventually, the lad went off on his own, and even spent a few years in Europe. He mastered several languages and even participated in the California Gold Rush. He died at age 61 of pneumonia on his way to the gold fields of Montana. The rooms are dark, with only a couple of small windows. Twenty-seven enlisted men and three sergeants lived in bunk beds in three rooms, about 20 feet by 18 feet each. Lewis and Clark shared a slightly larger room which included a table, chairs and two writing desks. Lewis’ servant, York, the only black man on the expedition, lived in one adjacent room while Shoshone Indian guide Sacajawea and her French husband Toussaint Charbonneau and their infant son Jean-Baptiste shared the other. By myself in the fort today, it was like time had never passed. There is no visual evidence of the modern age except the dim glow from a few well-hidden light bulbs. Only the sound of distant traffic gives away our times. How quiet the dense forest must have been in Lewis and Clark’s day. During the expedition's stay, the sounds were likely only the wind, rain and the men performing their chores. Some built and then improved the fort. Others made leather clothing, hunted deer and elk (seldom productively, forcing them to eat dog on occasion), or boiled seawater for salt by the ocean at present-day Seaside. Lewis and Clark worked on their maps and journals and saw to the everyday management of the fort. On March 23, 1806, the day the expedition finally departed for home, Lewis wrote in his journal, “We have lived as well as we had any right to expect.” Later that year, they returned as heroes to St. Louis --2 1/2 years after they had departed into the then-unknown American West. Fort Clatsop, three miles east of U.S. 101 south of Astoria, is open daily from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. mid-June through Labor Day, and then from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. the rest of the year. Campgrounds, both public and private are nearby, as are motels and hotels in nearby Astoria.
THE IMPORTANCE OF PLACE Today, at Fort Clatsop, as I stood in Lewis and Clark’s living quarters, I was almost overwhelmed
Because this was not, in fact, Lewis and Clark’s room. It’s a replica of their room. The beds are replicas. The desks are replicas. But most important, the site is likely off by a few dozen yards or more. Why is it so important to me, I wonder, to stand exactly where something happened, and not fifty feet away? A few years ago, I walked into the lobby of a hotel in New Mexico where the legendary writer Ernie Pyle visited nearly fifty years earlier. I stood in virtually the same place as Ernie had stood, on the exact same floor, separated only by time. I felt Ernie’s presence! We can read all about history and what happened at a particular place, but to actually go there — to stand on the exact place where the history occurred. . . well, to me, that’s what makes it the most meaningful. I wonder if other people feel this way, too. Do you? From Out West #46, winter, 2000 ©2002 by Out West Newspaper
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