Early Exploration

[Jay Edward (deceased)]

Early Contact Between Europeans and the Native People of the Coast

There is ample evidence of contact between Europeans and Native Americans before the arrival of Lewis and Clark.

French-Canadian voyageurs surely visited the coast and contributed their words to the Chinook Jargon, in which "Boston" referred to all whites. Metal knives and fishhooks were in use by the Chinooks, and Chief Concomly greeted Lewis and Clark in a Navy officers' coat.

The saddest heritage of these early contacts was the spread of disease. Smallpox could have come overland with the fur traders who preceded Lewis and Clark. In 1806 Lewis accounted for the abandoned villages by the effects of the disease.

Captain Clark reported "With the party of Clatsops who visited us last was a man of much lighter colour than the natives are generally. He was freckled with long duskey red hair, about 25 years of age, and certainly must be half white at least."

Gabriel Franchere of the Astor party interviewed an old man by the name of Soto who said he was the son of a survivor of a Spanish shipwreck near the mouth of the river.

Red-haired Indians visited Fort Astoria. Chunks of beeswax and stones with European-language markings were found at the base of Neah-Kah-Nie, giving rise to tales of shipwrecks and buried treasure.

Ross Cox reported another red-haired Indian in 1814. He had the name of Jack Ramsay tattooed on his left arm and said he was the son of an English sailor who lived among the Clatsops, married and had several children. By other reports, this son of Ramsay was Chief Cullaby.

Kilchis, the chief of the Tillamooks, was a tall, powerfully built descendant of a black sailor shipwrecked in the 1700s.

Chinese coins were used as decoration on the clothing of several tribes near the mouth of the Columbia. These coins dated from about 1750 and were current in Manila and other Asian ports.

The Neah-Kah-Nie Treasure
Large quantities of beeswax were traded and used by the Indians for candles and waterproofing. The source was a shipwreck at the base of Neah-Kah-Nie Mountain, and the beach sands were virtually mined for the stuff. Some of the chunks were marked with letters and symbols that were probably consignee identification marks, but there were also stones with similar markings. Porcelain and silver artifacts were also found. Combined with stories of buried chests and murdered slaves, the legend of the Neah-Kah-Nie treasure was born.

The latest information indicates that the ship that carried the beeswax was a Manila galleon that took treasure and trade goods from the Far East to Mexico and usually went along the 30th parallel, but got blown off course and ended up on the Oregon coast about 1620.

Early Exploration
During the Age of Exploration, an important goal was to find routes for trade with China. Columbus discovered the New World in an effort to sail west to reach the Far East. Southern routes were found around the newly discovered South American continent and around Africa, but they were extremely long and dangerous. The search for a northwest passage was an overriding concern of the early explorers to the Pacific Northwest.

The earliest Spanish, Russian and English explorers included Juan Cabrillo and Bartolome Ferrelo in 1542, Martin Aquilar and Sebastian Vizcaino in 1602 and 1603, and Sir Francis Drake in 1578. In 1741 Vitus Bering and Alexi Chirikov sailed eastward from Kamchatka and explored as far south as present day Sitka, Alaska, perhaps farther. They discovered the wealth of furs that was to become as important as the search for the Northwest Passage.

In 1766, Russia established a post on Kodiak Island to serve as a base for fur trading and exploration. Spain perceived the Russian presence to be a threat to its claim to the area, and in 1773 the Viceroy of Mexico was instructed to send expeditions northward.

In 1774, Juan Perez aboard the Santiago explored the coastline of the Pacific Northwest. On Aug 2 he discovered a harbor on the west side of what was to be named Vancouver Island. He named this harbor San Lorenzo, but it was to be renamed Nootka and to become the center of international controversy.

The following spring Bruno Heceta noticed a strong current of fresh water near 46 degrees north latitude. He named the river the San Roque but was unable to enter it due to the effects of scurvy on his crew. It would be fifteen years before the bar was eventually crossed.

In July of 1776, English Captain James Cook, with the ships Resolution and Discovery, made a final attempt to find the Northwest Passage, if it existed.

He discovered the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands, continued east and sighted the coast of Oregon in March 1778 at Yaquina Bay. He continued north, without sighting the Columbia River, to Nootka, and then, determining that there was no Northwest Passage, went on to Hawaii to meet his fate.

The colorful and many-talented John Meares was a retired British Navy officer who made several voyages around the Pacific on several different ships under different flags. He had little respect for monopolies, claims or licenses. It was he who, in search of the San Roque "from the Spanish charts," named Cape Disappointment. A scheme to import Hawaiians to man a lumber mill town at Nootka drew the attention of the Spanish, who sent Don Esteven Jose Martinez to Nootka in 1788 to protect their claim.

The Nootka Conference
England, Spain and Russia had conflicting claims to the territory and its burgeoning fur trade, so representatives of each nation were called to Nootka for a conference to decide the matter.

Capt. George Vancouver had accompanied Cook and was the English representative to the Nootka conference. On April 29, 1792, on the way to the conference, Vancouver met the American captain Robert Gray. Gray informed Vancouver that he had been off the mouth of a large river, which he was unable to enter. Vancouver did not believe that he could have missed such a great river and continued on to Nootka, on the island that bears his name.

Captain Robert W. Gray
In 1792, Captain Robert Gray, commanding the Columbia Rediviva, was first to cross the Columbia River bar and enter the river. Gray also held the distinction of being the first to sail around the world under the flag of the United States. Just as the Nootka Conference was getting under way, Gray staked the American claim to the Columbia River area.

Captain Gray was born in Tiverton, Rhode Island on May 10, 1755. He commanded a privateer during the Revolutionary War, and later sailed in the service of a group of Boston merchants.

Captains Robert Gray and John Kendrick on the Lady Washington and the Columbia Rediviva traded with the Indians for furs, and traded the furs with the Chinese for the tea that he took back to Boston. In 1788, Captain Gray discovered Tillamook Head.

On the voyage of 1791, both ships were attacked and crewmen killed. At the American encampment at Clayoquot on Vancouver Island they built a fort and a little sloop named Adventure. Kendrick took furs to China on the Lady Washington, the Adventure went north for trade and Gray went south on the Columbia Rediviva to the Great River of the West.

After one failed attempt to cross the bar, on the 11th of May, 1792 Gray anchored ten miles inside the bar, "the north side of the river a half mile distant from the ship; the south side of the same two and a half miles distant; a village on the north side of the river west by north, distant three quarters of a mile." He named the river after his ship, and Point Adams and Cape Hancock (Disappointment) after his officers.

The tone of his log entry on that day indicates that Gray did not fully appreciate the significance of his deed, and, judging by the absence of notoriety during the rest of his life, the general public did not appreciate it, either.

Gray continued the fur trade in China in 1793, but he was never to return to the Columbia. He married Martha Howland Atkins on February 13, 1794, and had four daughters, but enjoyed neither notoriety nor wealth, and after a few years at the helm of merchant vessels he died in poverty in 1806 at Charleston, WV.

Lewis and Clark
As the British, Spanish, Russians, and Americans contested control of the territory called the Pacific, Thomas Jefferson endeavored to legitimize Captain Gray's claim for the U.S. by exploring the newly acquired Louisiana Territory. To contact the indigenous peoples along the way, to determine the existence of a Northwest Passage, and to reach the Pacific, he charged his personal secretary, Army Captain Meriwether Lewis, to lead an expedition.

Lewis in turn called upon his friend, William Clark, to join the Army Corps of Discovery. Lewis was the more cultured of the two and Clark a backwoodsman, but their respective talents and abilities complemented each other well, and by 1806 they had traveled 8,000 miles, established relationships with the natives tribes, mapped the land, cataloged the flora and fauna, compiled their journals, having led one of the most successful expeditions of all time.

Lewis and Clark left St. Louis on May 14, 1804 with 43 men, including Clark's slave York, and Lewis' Newfoundland dog, Seaman. They went up the Missouri in a 55-foot keelboat and two large canoes. They spent the winter at Fort Mandan where they hired Toussaint Charbonneau as an interpreter, and got his Shoshone wife, Sacagawea, in the bargain.

In the spring of 1805 a contingent was sent back to St. Louis with specimens and reports. The remaining party of 33 proceeded to the headwaters of the Missouri where they purchased horses for the difficult crossing of the Rocky Mountains. In September they came to a tributary of the Columbia where they built five dugout canoes for the final leg of their journey to the Pacific.

On November 7, 1805 the Corps of Discovery reached the mouth of the Columbia, but were forced to battle bad weather and rough water for several days before establishing Station Camp west of Point Ellice.

After consulting the Indians, it was decided that they would spend the winter on the south shore of the river, since game was more plentiful there and salt could be procured from seawater. This decision was made by democratic vote, with sufferage extended to both York and Sacagawea.

Fort Clatsop was built on the Netul River, later renamed the Lewis and Clark. By Christmas Eve the fort was nearly complete. Salt works were set up in what is now Seaside; far enough from the river so as to boil undiluted seawater. Elk were indeed plentiful for food and hides and a party was also sent to Ecola to obtain oil and blubber from a beached whale.

Captain Lewis' keen power of observation and his scientific description of the plants, animals and people of the lower Columbia are an invaluable resource for scientists today, serving as a 200-year benchmark to which current observations may be compared.

Lewis and Clark left the fort and its contents to Clatsop Chief Coboway on March 23, 1806. In the journal entry for that day Clark wrote that they had "lived as well as they had any right to expect" in spite of the rain "which has fallen almost constantly."

John Jacob Astor and the Pacific Fur Co.
The reports from the Corps of Discovery inspired John Jacob Astor to endeavor to establish an American fur-trading center at the mouth of the Columbia. His Pacific Fur Company was to collect furs from the interior and from coastwise trade for shipment to China.

To accomplish this, he hired men from the English North West Fur Company, in Montreal. In September of 1810 the ship Tonquin sailed from New York bound for the mouth of the Columbia with men and supplies for a trading post. On March 12, 1811 an overland party left St. Louis to locate potential sites for trading posts and to rendezvous with the Tonquin.

Captain Jonathan Thorn of the Tonquin was disliked and distrusted by the French-Canadian and Scottish fur traders aboard. Eight men were lost in two ill-advised attempts to find a channel across the Columbia River bar in March of 1811, but ultimately Thorn deposited the crew and a few supplies ashore before proceeding north.

The eventual site of the City of Astoria was chosen because it was out of cannon range of the natural channel on the north side of the river. Clearing of the site began on April 12, 1811. That site is now 15th and Exchange, and the rock they used to gauge the tide is at 15th and Commercial.

The hard work of building in the incessant rain, the poor food, and especially the lack of any medical care caused great dissention among Duncan McDougal's men, and when it was learned that the Tonquin had been destroyed on Vancouver Island, dissention turned to despair. Not only had they lost the means to establish the coastal trade, they also lost most of the supplies for the post. They quickly built palisades, installed cannons; and a trading post more resembled a fort.

Meanwhile, the overland party headed by Wilson Price Hunt encountered serious challenges along the way and was behind schedule. They did not know the fate of the other party. On January 28, 1812, the Indians of the upper Columbia told Hunt that white men had indeed built a fort at the mouth of the river, but that they were in trouble and were anxious to see their friends.

The arrival of the overland party with news of good prospects on the upper river was followed on May 10th by the arrival of the ship Beaver, with supplies, trade goods and more men. Parties were dispatched to trade upriver and the Beaver sailed north to obtain furs from the Russians in Alaska. Things were looking up for the Astorians.

But in October of 1812 a state of war existed between Great Britain and the United States and the Northwest Fur Company forced the Astorians to sell their holdings under threat of the imminent attack by a British warship.
Captain Black of the H.M.S. Racoon took possession of Astoria on December 13, 1813 and renamed it Fort George. While it reverted to U.S. control after the war, the British continued in the declining fur trade. The Hudson's Bay Company took over the North West Fur Company in 1821 and four years later moved the headquarters to Fort Vancouver.

By the time the Hudson's Bay Company abandoned Astoria a change in fashion had decimated the fur market, over-hunting had decimated the sea otter, and smallpox and malaria had decimated the Indians. The people who lived on the lower Columbia for thousands of years were nearly wiped out in little more than fifty.

Although Robert Gray and Lewis and Clark extended the American claim to the region, Astor's recruits were from the English fur companies. They were generally Scottish and French-Canadian men, many of whom married Indian women and felt at least a sentimental allegiance to the Crown.

Ranald MacDonald
Archibald MacDonald was Chief Factor of the Hudson's Bay Company and married a daughter of the Chinook chief Concomly. Their son Ranald was born at Fort George on February 3rd, 1824. He grew up on various Company posts and became a bank clerk, but his wanderlust took him to the Sea of Japan aboard the whaling ship Plymouth.

In July of 1848 he launched a 27-foot sailboat from the whaler and headed for the coast of Japan, which was forbidden to foreigners. He intentionally capsized the boat on Rishiri Island and posed as a castaway. He was imprisoned at Nagasaki but treated well, and became the first English teacher in Japan. His students translated for Commodore Perry's expedition six years later.

Champoeg
The Hudson's Bay Company was governed by the laws of Great Britain, and controlled the whole territory, but by 1840 American missionaries and immigrants had settled in the Willamette Valley.

Ostensibly to settle the estate of Ewing Young and to provide for the extermination of wolves, meetings were held to settle the differences between the English and American interests.

On May 2, 1843, virtually every adult white man in the territory was present at Champoeg, and by a vote of 52 to 50, a provisional American government was established for the Oregon Territory.

Jane Barnes
The first white woman in the west was Miss Jane Barnes. She came aboard the Isaac Todd in April of 1814. Her presence in Astoria caused quite a stir, though, and she was later returned to England.

Shanghaied in Astoria
The early days in Astoria were rough-and-tumble times. Before there were highways or railroads the Columbia was the sole means of transportation, and Astoria was the gatekeeper of the Great River of the West.

The seafaring life was little better than prison for the hands of a sailing ship, and berths were hard to fill. The labor brokers were called "crimps" and resorted to kidnapping and trickery to man the vessels. Many a farm boy woke up bound for Shanghai with a hangover or a knot on his head.

There were too many opportunities to jump ship in the coastwise trade, so crimps supplied hands for the ocean-going vessels only. Crimps were active in every port, but were regarded as little better than slave-traders. When their practices crossed the line into illegality, they were often prosecuted, except in Astoria, which had the reputation of harboring the "blood-suckers." The most famous of the crimps was Jim Turk, who operated the Sailors' Home rooming house in Astoria.

The Shark and Cannon Beach
The United States Schooner Shark was sent to give comfort and encouragement to the Americans. She entered the Columbia on July 18, 1846, and promptly went aground. High tide and local help freed them early the next morning and they proceeded upriver to the Willamette River and Tuality Plains, Fort Vancouver and the Dalles.

They again went aground on their way out, though, and on September 10th the Shark broke up in the surf. Aided by Solomon Smith and ferried to Astoria, the crew built a double log cabin near the fort, which later became the first home for several early pioneer families.

The stranded men carved their names on a rock on the bank of the river near what is now 13th and Exchange, but after part of it (now at the Maritime Museum) was removed, the remainder was buried under fill for a parking lot.
Part of the hull of the Shark, with three cannons attached, found its way to the beach some twenty-five miles to the south. One cannon was retrieved in 1898 and today's Cannon Beach is named for it.

[buckshot roberts]

:D Jay thanks this was some good reading over my morning coffee, Ron