A short forest path leads from the 1805-06 winter camp for the Corps of Discovery, Fort Clatsop, to their sheltered canoe landing site on the Lewis and Clark River near Astoria, Ore.
Here, Sea Lion guests examined exact replicas of the log dugouts (Capt. Wm. Clark called them canoes in the journals) that carried the explorers some 490 miles down the Clearwater, Snake and Columbia rivers to the Pacific Ocean.
It was hard to imagine that 31 men, Sacajawea and her infant son and Capt. Meriwether Lewis' Newfoundland dog, plus all their equipment, were crammed into just five dugouts like these.
They built their dugouts from Ponderosa pine logs, as directed by Nez Perce Indians at Canoe Camp on the bank of the North Fork Clearwater in Idaho. The task took 10 days in spite of sickness throughout the ranks.
A combination of chopping with axes and adzes and then fire in the hollow shaped the logs to carry them through boulder studded rapids and chutes. On the Columbia estuary they paddled into storm driven waves.
These same five dugouts, plus two finely crafted Clatsop Indian canoes, started them on their return home in 1806. These they traded for horses about 275 miles up Columbia River.
