Standing at intersection of history
Standing here on the north bank of the mighty Columbia River, you'll need to wait for a rare moment when no tugs are lumbering up or down stream, and no 737s are blasting out of Portland International Airport.
Narrow your eyes enough to squeeze out the big power lines above the opposite shore. Peer east, into the mouth of the Columbia River Gorge, and forget you know where the river leads.
From this very spot, you can reenact that magical instant the first white explorers surveyed the lower Columbia River, Northwest America's own cradle of civilization.
Their names were not Lewis and Clark.
It was 200 years ago this Friday that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark pointed their keelboat and two canoes up the Missouri River near St. Louis, bound for an epic adventure through Western territory never before seen by anyone who knew the words to "Yankee Doodle."
But contrary to popular perception, the end point of their expedition — today's Pacific Northwest — was far from a natural wonderland unaffected by humans.
Before Lewis and Clark took even a step toward the Rockies, the lower Columbia already was the cultural equivalent of a shopping-mall food court, with Russian, European, American and perhaps even Japanese influences arriving via ships sailing along the Pacific Coast.
And by the time they arrived at our squinting spot, on a gravelly beach several miles east of present-day Washougal, Clark County, Lewis and Clark stood at a true intersection of history.
From this point forward, for the final 115 miles to the Pacific, they were following a map — one sketched 13 years before by a man who had claimed the entire river drainage for another nation. To some people who spend a lot of time wearing 19th-century-style buckskin clothing and poking around the banks of the Columbia, this is an important distinction. Roger Wendlick is one of them, and proud of it.
He will be the first to tell you that the current Lewis and Clark hoopla — which could bring as many as several million history-loving tourists down the big river in the coming two years — should be a lot more than just an excuse for people in oversized motorhomes to start Googling for campsites with wi-fi service.
For him, it sparked a passion that turned his life upside down.
Wendlick, a 59-year-old heavy-equipment operator from Portland, became an armchair historian by accident. In 1986, he looked at an odd, collectible Lewis-and-Clark plate — the one thing left to him by his grandmother — and decided, on a whim, to search for similar treasures.
To make a long and very expensive story short, Wendlick, over the next dozen years, became obsessed with Corps of Discovery materials. He eventually mortgaged his house (three times) and maxed out seven to 10 credit cards, in a mad attempt to gather the world's largest private collection of Lewis and Clark stuff — especially rare, early-edition books recounting their journey.
And once he got it all assembled, he kept the most prized items in a large vault in his bedroom, where he slept every night with a shotgun to protect them.
Wendlick was both lucky and cunning. He assumed that when the Lewis and Clark bicentennial approached, his little treasure trove would be worth something.
He was right: Portland's Lewis & Clark College in 1998 purchased all of it — well over 2,000 items — for $375,000, which Wendlick used to climb out of debt and buy a new car, and an annual annuity of $30,000, which he lives off until his pension kicks in.
He retired the day after the deal, which also gave him a desk at the college, and a title: "Collector in Residence." Not bad for a guy with no college education.
Now, he says, he's "living his dream," traveling the West, giving Lewis and Clark lectures and portraying, in full leathers, George Drouillard, the expedition's chief hunter. He spends more time than he cares to admit living the part, wondering what his character must have felt as he headed down the Columbia and began to smell that ocean.
The lost explorer
Flabbergasted might be one word. Lewis and Clark knew the west end of the Columbia already had been touched by white civilization. They had no idea how much.
Imagine their shock, after trekking more than 17 months through the pristine mountains West, only to be greeted in the Columbia River Gorge by natives decked out in British sailing uniforms, cooking with metal tea kettles and trading colorful insults ("Sumabeech!") clearly not of local origin.
Lewis and Clark then began recognizing landmarks that confirmed they had left the unexplored West: River features began to match Lewis' tracing of a chart sketched by a British naval officer, Lt. William Robert Broughton.
Broughton, a member of the George Vancouver expedition that first mapped Puget Sound, had rowed with a crew more than 100 miles up the river to Point Vancouver, where, on Oct. 30, 1792, they did two notable things. They planted the British flag, claiming the entire Columbia River drainage for "His Britannic Majesty." And they surmised the river's source probably would be found just up around the bend, on the flanks of Mount Hood.
The British flag never stuck; the surmise was a guess that missed by more than 1,000 miles. Still, Broughton was the first white man to survey most of the lower Columbia and view it in its most unaffected state. But his rowboat journey has been largely forgotten by all but the most giddy Northwest history buffs.
Like Roger Wendlick, whose fixation on Lewis and Clark bled into the Broughton expedition, ultimately landing him a seat in a replica British cutter, which he and other history-nut volunteers rowed and sailed from Astoria to Vancouver Point in 1992.
That bicentennial reenactment of Broughton's trek received scant attention outside the Portland/Vancouver area. But it left Wendlick awed at how some parts of the river, weighed against written testimony of Broughton's men, appeared virtually unchanged ... while other scenes were unimaginably altered.
A good example of both is at Burial Rock, near Prescott, Ore., a solemn place where dead Chinook tribesmen were left in their cedar canoes. That spot looked in 1992 precisely as Broughton described it in 1792, just without the bodies. And right behind it stood the strobe-lighted cooling tower of the Trojan nuclear reactor.
To Wendlick, it seemed an otherworldly collision of destinies.
A river discovered
Lower Columbia natives, thriving on salmon, cedar and trade goods, could not have imagined the tumult that would follow Lewis and Clark down this river. In their experience, white people always came from the other direction.
Shipwrecks along the Pacific Coast in the early 1700s left more than just wreckage. Long before Broughton or Lewis and Clark, tribal people already had a name for white interlopers: " 'Tlo-hon-nipts," or "those who drift ashore," notes Columbia River historian Hobe Kytr of Ilwaco, Pacific County, who believes castaways from as far away as Japan could have been assimilated into local tribes.
In the late 1700s, however, whites from Britain, Spain, Russia and the fledgling United States started landing decidedly on purpose — still searching, 300 years after Columbus stumbled upon North America, for that elusive Northwest water passage through it.
Spanish explorers had detected a large freshwater river near the 46th parallel in 1775. But the river's actual discovery was made in May 1792 by an upstart American privateer. Robert Gray survived the treacherous crossing of the roiling Columbia River bar, traded with the locals and named the river after his ship, the Columbia Rediviva.
Gray's sketchy chart soon passed from the hands of Spaniards at Nootka Sound to a stunned Capt. Vancouver, who had sailed right past the river and declared it a bay earlier the same summer.
In a classic cover-your-keel move, Vancouver rushed his small fleet south to investigate. Vancouver's ship, Discovery, like many to come after it, couldn't make it over the bar. But the smaller tender, Chatham, captained by Broughton, survived the tumult and finally sailed into Gray's fabled river.
Broughton piloted the vessel inland about 15 miles, then set out to explore the mysterious land upstream in rowboats — the same ones used for the first exploration of the San Juan Islands.
As the water turned from a wide, salt-infused bay to a river, Broughton found a land alive with wildlife, surrounded by rich forests and some open plains, and dotted by numerous tribal villages — some occupied, some not.
Historians believe a wave of smallpox, likely brought by Spanish explorers in the 1770s, had decimated native populations by the time Broughton arrived, reducing the coastal native population by as much as half.
Yet the local tribes were a powerful commercial force, middlemen in a thriving trade network stretching from California to Alaska and inland as far as the Great Lakes. Broughton's men noted imported copper goods when they met their first natives here.
Dozens of commercial ships followed Gray and Broughton into the river, trading metal goods for sea otter pelts, which then were exchanged in China for tea, silk and spices. The boats' summer-long anchorages turned into annual trade fests for tribal people.
The life of a river
Broughton's men navigated a braided river channel that followed its present course to a surprising degree. A dozen dams higher on river have turned much of the Columbia into a managed waterway, removing remarkable features such as Celilo Falls near The Dalles. And at the Pacific, the mouth and inner bays have been radically altered by jetties on both sides.
But 200 years is a fraction of a second in the life cycle of a big river, and experts say the course of the Columbia below the first dam at Bonneville is largely the same as in the days of the explorers. Most of the large river-channel islands Broughton landed on, charted and named still exist. You can't drive between Portland and Seattle on Interstate 5 without crossing at least one of them.
While many place names assigned by Broughton on his 10-day trek live on — Mount Hood, named for a British admiral during the Revolutionary War; Mount St. Helens, after a town near Liverpool; Point Vancouver, after their first in command, to name just a few — little mention of the man himself is found along his route. A pullout on Interstate 84 in Oregon near Rooster Rock bears a Broughton historical marker, but that's about it.
The closest current residents to Point Vancouver, Broughton's historic turning point, live on a 300-acre cattle ranch and say they never heard of the man.
And even as the predicted hordes of Lewis and Clark trekkers begin to retrace the Corps of Discovery's route west this spring, the replica cutter that Wendlick rowed up the river 12 years ago is covered with a tarp in a Port of Vancouver warehouse.
"A lot of people who are into history know the story," Wendlick says, "and it's written on a few signs. But the general populace, they don't have a clue."
But, as Wendlick has proved, it's never too late to get one. All most people need, he believes, is an excuse to remember, a tool with which to dig for their roots. His was an old collectible plate. Yours might be the anniversary of Lewis and Clark's trudge to the West.
"When I was in high school, I hated history — hated it," Wendlick says as he pokes around near yet another of Broughton's old campsites near Woodland, Cowlitz County.
Only later in life did he learn how much dreaming about the past grounds you in the present.
"You become so much more aware of your surroundings — the land, the trees, the birds, the river — everything," he says, peering at a map and wondering how the river might have bent this way or that since Broughton rowed up the river, or Lewis and Clark floated down it.
"Now that I'm hooked, this is my life."
Ron C. Judd: 206-464-8280 or rjudd@seattletimes.com
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