Research Files: Imagining Fort Clatsop

Abstract

RESEARCH FILES Imagining Fort Clatsop byFrederickL. Brown ON OCTOBER 3, 2005, JUST weeks before the bicentennial of the Corps ofDiscovery's arrival on thePa cificCoast, firedestroyed the replica of Fort Clatsop. In rebuilding the fortex hibit, theNational Park Service faced a problem. Community members had built the 1955 replica using the floor plan sketched out byWilliam Clark on the elkskin cover of his journal. The sketch had served the replica builders well, since itprovided exact dimensions and precise information on the placement of doors and picket lines.Unfortunately, written evidence from the enlistedmen's journals ? in cluding one stillundiscovered in 1955 ? suggests that the fortbuilt by the Expedition members in 1805 may have strayed from Clark's plan. The fort may have had threebuildings on three sides of a parade ground instead of two buildings on either side. Because of this new evidence, National Park Service employees undertook a careful examination of all the journals to see if they provided precise information on the fort constructed by the Corps ofDiscovery. The journals do contain a little noticed passage that provides a very detailed description of one building on the coast thatwinter. On January 9, 1806,William Clark described the building as "27 footwide 35 feet long Sunk in the ground 5 feet 2 Dores 8c 2 fire places dores 29 Ins. high & 14 lAwide handsom Steps to decend down a post in themiddle Coverede with boards Split thin an 2 feetwide." Such precise dimensions could serve a reconstructer well ? dimensions so precise that they suggest Clark took out his tapemeasure so he could provide the most accurate picture possible. Unfortunately, as you may have guessed, this passage does not describe Fort Clatsop at all but one of theNehalem Tillamook houses Clark encountered on the coast between Ecola Creek and the saltworks.While Clark and Lewis provided detailed descriptions of native houses, they wrote down no such precise depictions of their own Fort Clatsop. Why not? we might ask. Thomas Jefferson had given the captains careful instructions to collect the information needed to catalog the American West. His was an Enlighten ment project of using careful observa tion to describe and understand those 590 OHQ vol. 107, no. 4 ? 2006 Oregon Historical Society T/ieForfClatsop replica,built in 1955,smolders the morning after itcaughtfire on October 3, 2005. distant lands. The explorers were to collect information on native people's "domestic accomodations," along with a long listof other aspects of Indians' physical and moral universe. They were also tomake careful note of astro nomical observations, dead-reckoning notations, weather observations, and descriptions of flora and fauna.1 Jef ferson had no scientific interest in cataloging standard construction tech niques used by thefrontiersmenon the Expedition. He did not wait anxiously in Washington, D.C., to learn the di mensions of their seacoast fort. Absent detailed portrayals of Fort Clatsop, we are left with imagining a fort that the journals do not precisely describe. One way of imagining the 1805 fort is to pull together scattered clues from the journals ? clues from the different journalists about the number of workers in camp each day, the time that specific tasks took, and the tools present at theworksite. This essay attempts such a project of research and imagination, using the information from the journals. Since this effortdoes not exhaust the evidence available, however, the Park Service hopes it will spur the explora tion of additional avenues of research. Others, for instance, could consider the construction techniques and fort layouts the men would have been familiar with given their experiences on theOhio and Kentucky frontier. The Park Service makes notes of the uncertainty of evidence in referring to thenewly rebuilt fortas an "exhibit" rather than a "reconstruction." Future interpretation of the fort exhibit will Brown, Imagining FortClatsop 591 encourage visitors to consider this evidence to come up with their own image of the fort. This essay sorts the evidence from the journals, firstchronologically, and then spatially, to provide a portrait of the fort. It lays side-by-side each day's journal entries and weather observations from all the journal keepers to construct a narrative of the fort-building process (see sidebars for examples). Then itpulls together...