Down the Great Columbia with Lewis and Clark

Oct 14, 2005 by Naomi.

The first great day of the 4 day commemorative stopover of Lewis and Clark down the great Columbia River is over. We are celebrating for four days but the voyage of discovery landed on October 16 and left after noon on the eighteenth. Oddly enough Lewis thought he was on the Columbia River when they left Clarkston and the Clearwater river in Idaho. This is one of the many mistakes that Lewis took to heart as his failures in the journey. He brooded about his failures and had a couple of serious enemies that dogged his progress when he returned to St. Louis in 1806.

The party landed at the bank of what is now Sacajawea State park at the confluence of the Snake and Columbia rivers. The park is tree covered and a lovely place to picnic and enjoy the waters.

Two hundred years ago, however, nary a green blade of grass nor tree was visible “as far as the eye could extend” so said Ordway in his journal. Clark didn’t like the absence of trees either. He was just civilized enough to want his food cooked over a wood fire. Silly, huh?

Lewis did his best to record everything about the native peoples which was tough because no one spoke the language. The half breed Druillard did a pretty good job with sign language but some concepts were impossible to get across to the Easterners. How about the idea that everyone owned the land? and the sky? and the sun? Well Lewis and Clark were well aware of measuring land for settlers and they knew what boundaries meant. And so they assumed that everybody should know that.

What my Discovery Walk was all about was explaining and illustrating what the point of land was like two hundred years ago. All desert, native plants that people living here for centuries knew what they could be used for in daily life. I had examples of rabbit brush, sagebrush, buckwheat, and bitterbrush. I showed them how sturdy dogbane could be as cordage tying their arrowheads to shafts, and even the rose and dogwood that was used for shafts for arrows and spears. The sixty degree weather kept the cement floor cold under my Yakama moccasins but the elkskins kept me quite comfortable otherwise.

It was all interesting and entertaining, especially for me. And I will be out there tomorrow for more of the same.

Posted in Social Commentary | No Comments »