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game. To acquire game, in fact, they had to range further and further from Fort Clatsop. Much of their food, including wappato roots and fatty “candle fish,” had to be obtained by trading with the local Clatsop Indian tribe. Other Chinookian-speaking peoples in the vicinity included the tribe Lewis and Clark called the Wahiakkums, north of the Columbia estuary, and the Tillamooks down the coast to the south of Fort Clatsop. But the members of the Corps of Discovery found trading with the Clatsops more congenial.

    Fig 2.9
Columbia River estuary, seen from a hill above Astoria, Oregon. The expedition followed the Washington shoreline when it arrived in early November 1805. On the left can be seen Chinook Point, on the distant horizon Cape Disappointment, and in the middle ground the Astoria Bridge connecting Oregon and Washington. Photo by Jeffrey Phillip Curry. Courtesy, Jeffrey Phillip Curry.

    Because of the nearly constant rainfall, everyone in Fort Clatsop became eager to leave the coastal range, even though they knew the high country of the Bitterroots would be impossible to cross before June because of the snowpack. On March 22, 1806, the expedition departed anyway, retracing its path up the Columbia. Moving past St. Helens, Oregon, and parallel to the route of Interstate 5, the party came upon a large river flowing from the south and entering the Columbia 142 miles upstream from its mouth, by Clark’s reckoning. [VII, 66] They had missed the mouth of the Multnomah River on the outward journey because it was screened by a long island. From this point, on April 2 Clark reported that he was able to view the snowcapped volcanic peaks of Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, and Mount Adams in Washington and Mount Hood in Oregon. WhileLewis and the main body set up camp near present-day Washougal, Washington, Clark led six men to take a look at the Multnomah River. They encountered several villages of Chinookian-speaking people within the environs of Portland before returning to the main camp on the Columbia. For most of the rest of April the expedition repeated the portages of the previous fall around the Cascades and The Dalles. Tempers grew short as they dealt with the demands of, and thefts by, the Indian bands that controlled them. The captains were determined to cover much of the return route to the Nez Perce by land, but a dwindling supply of trade goods made it difficult to obtain horses.
    On April 29, rather than continue up the Snake River, the Corps of Discovery struck out overland at the juncture of the Columbia and Walla Walla rivers, about thirty miles west of Walla Walla, Washington, to the Touchet River and through the sites of Prescott, Waitsburg, and Dayton, Washington. Lewis described the Touchet as “a bold Creek 10 yds. Wide,” its fertile bottom thick with cottonwood, birch, wild roses, and various berries, but the “surrounding plains,” he wrote, “are poor and sandy. The hills of the creek are generally abrupt and rocky.” [VII, 186–187] The nearly bare plain cut by tributaries flowing from the Blue Mountains to the south is now used primarily for dryland wheat farming. On May 3 they crossed the Tucannon River and proceeded along the valley of Pataha Creek to Pomeroy and down a steep gulch to the Snake River and its tributary, the Clearwater, west of Clarkston, Washington, and Lewiston, Idaho. They marched up the north bank of the stream they had floated down the previous fall, crossed it at the mouth of Potlatch (“Colter’s”) Creek, then climbed up the south wall of the canyon downstream from the Canoe Camp site, on a rolling plateau called the Camas Prairie. This area south and west of the Clearwater River breaks is much like the Weippe Prairie from which the expedition had emerged the previous fall following the harrowing crossing of the Lolo Trail. Paralleling the main stem of the Clearwater, the party descended into the canyon by way of Lawyer