The Corps left Fort Clatsop on March 23, 1806, in a hurry to reach Nez Perce country and cross the mountains that had so tortured them the year before. Ten days of pushing against the Columbia’s current took them to the mouth of the Willamette River, which they had missed entirely on their descent. Clark ascended the river to near present-day Swan Island, where he noted: “at this place I think the wedth of the river may be Stated at 500 yards and Sufficiently deep for a Man of War or Ship of any burthen.” He also learned about the Clackamas River and a major fishing site at the falls of the Willamette. His detailed maps of the region filled in more details about the Columbia’s confusing drainage pattern, but adherence to preconceived geographical ideas led him to imagine the source of the Willamette far south of its origin.
Upstream from the Willamette and past the Sandy River, the Corps struggled against a strong current in the Gorge. Their poor relations with Indians at the Cascades did not improve. On the descent in the fall of 1805, the captains had complained about theft and the Indians’ demands for payments to pass by the rapids. In 1806, tensions increased. At one point, a Corps member drew a knife on an Indian, others stole Lewis’s dog, Seaman, which prompted Lewis to send “three men in pursuit of the theives with orders if they made the least resistence or difficulty in surrendering the dog to fire on them.” The episode ended without violence, but they had more difficulty at The Dalles one week later.
The Columbia’s current forced them to abandon their two pirogues and to seek horses from Indians who demanded high prices—“double that which we had formerly given for those which we purchased from the Shoshonees”—and would give up only four, even though, as Lewis noted with frustration, “they have a great abundance of horse but will not dispose of them.” Lewis lost all patience in his negotiations, railed at pilfering that bedeviled the Corps, and informed the Indians:
I would shoot the first of them that attempted to steal an article from us. that we were not affraid to fight them, that I had it in my power at that moment to destroy them all and set fire to their houses, but it was not my wish to treat them with severity provided they would let my property alone.
By then, Lewis and Clark had abandoned their mission of establishing trade relations with Indian groups on the Columbia. Their need for horses and their eagerness to return to the Plains and the Missouri seemed to encourage their willingness to end trade negotiations and flex their power as an answer to Indian intransigence.
© William L. Lang, 2004
