Newfound Map May Locate Fort Clatsop

PORTLAND - A newly discovered map drawn in 1851 may help unlock one of the stubborn mysteries of the Lewis and Clark expedition: Where exactly was Fort Clatsop, where the explorers spent the cold, soggy winter of 1805-06?

Anthropologists and historians have made periodic attempts to find the site, most recently last fall, and say they know about where it was, near Warrenton, south of Astoria.

Homesteaders' accounts from a century ago as to where the ruins of the log fort stood agree on a general area, but there is disagreement on details. The area has been logged and farmed since Lewis and Clark were there.

Scott Byram, a doctoral candidate in anthropology from the University of Oregon, found the map by accident this month while researching Oregon Indian history at the National Archives in Greenbelt, Md.

It had been drawn in 1851 by a member of the U.S. Coast Survey, which was mapping the lower Columbia River. It labels the fort area "Log Hut Lewis and Clark wintered in 1805."

It shows the fort at the edge of a slope that drops down to the river's flood plain. Such a slope still exists, and the Lewis and Clark River at that point is still as wide as the map says it was, 150 yards.

"The map is significant because it tells us we're looking in the right place," said Jim Thompson, the regional archaeologist for the National Park Service in Seattle, which will resume the search for the fort in April.

Researchers for the Lewis and Clark project plan to visit the archives this spring to see if there are written accounts of the fort's location.

Capts. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and the band of soldiers they led on the exploration of the West built the fort near the mouth of the Columbia in late 1805.

A replica of the fort was built in the 1950s and is maintained by the National Park Service, possibly within a few hundred feet of where the fort actually sat, if the newly found map is accurate.

"I didn't know whether Fort Clatsop investigators had actually seen the map," Byram said

No maps by Lewis and Clark locating the fort are known to exist, although their drawings of the fort survive.

The fort, 50 feet square, took about a month to build and was occupied for about three months. The expedition left for home March 23, 1806.

The most recent probe, last fall and summer, centered on an area within a few hundred feet of the replica.

Researchers were taking soil samples to test for phosphates that might tell them where the fort's outhouses and garbage pits were, information that could help pinpoint the fort itself.