Ocean in view! O! the joy

A Mission From the President

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory from France. It doubled the size of the country overnight. But nobody in Washington really knew what was out there.

Jefferson wanted a water route to the Pacific, if one existed. He wanted maps, plants, animals, and peaceful contact with the Native nations of the West.

He gave the job to his personal secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, an Army officer. Lewis chose an old Army friend to share command, William Clark.

Here's what people forget. The Corps of Discovery was a military unit. Most of its members were enlisted soldiers in the United States Army. They stood guard. They hunted. They hauled boats upstream by rope when the current was too strong to paddle.

Any veteran would recognize that outfit. Sergeants, discipline, duty rosters. And a few enlisted men who kept their own journals, Sergeant John Ordway, Sergeant Patrick Gass, and Private Joseph Whitehouse, so we can hear the journey from the ranks, not just from the officers.

In May of 1804, they started up the Missouri River from near Saint Louis. That first summer, Sergeant Charles Floyd died, probably of a burst appendix. He would be the only member of the Corps to die on the entire journey.

But the two people who'd matter most to how this story ends hadn't joined yet. And neither one was a soldier.

Sacagawea and York

The Corps spent its first winter at Fort Mandan, in what is now North Dakota. There, the captains hired a French-Canadian trader named Toussaint Charbonneau as an interpreter. With him came his young Shoshone wife, Sacagawea.

That winter, she gave birth to a son, Jean Baptiste. When the Corps set out in the spring of 1805, she carried him on her back, across the plains and over the Rocky Mountains.

She was not a guide the way the legends say. But she was invaluable. In August of 1805, the Corps reached her own Shoshone people, and their chief turned out to be her brother, Cameahwait. She had been taken from her people as a girl. Now she was home, if only briefly, and with her help the captains got the horses they needed to cross the mountains. And a woman with a baby told every tribe they met something important. This was not a war party.

Then there was York. York was enslaved. He belonged to William Clark. He paddled, hunted and carried loads like every soldier in the Corps. Many Native people along the route had never seen a Black man before.

But when it was over, the soldiers got pay and land. York got neither.

Remember both of them. Before the winter was out, the captains would write down their opinions right alongside the soldiers'.

Ocian in View

By the fall of 1805, the Corps had crossed the Rockies, nearly starving in the Bitterroot snows. The Nez Perce people fed them and kept their horses. The Corps built dugout canoes and rode the Clearwater and Snake Rivers down to the Columbia, then west, through rapids and gorges, toward the sea.

On the morning of November 7th, the river was foggy and cold. Their small canoe got separated in the fog. They stopped at a Wahkiakum village and traded for fish and roots. And then the fog cleared. The Columbia had grown enormous, miles wide, rising and falling with the tide. And the men could hear waves.

That's when Clark wrote it. Ocian in view.

In his journal that night, he wrote it out longer. "Great joy in camp we are in View of the Ocian, this great Pacific Octean which we been So long anxious to See." By his count, they'd made thirty-four miles that day.

I respect that notebook. Before satellites, sailors found their way the same way Clark did. Course, speed, time, distance, written down by hand, over and over. You trust the log. And on this day, the log said they'd made it.

But they hadn't. They were camped across from a tall basalt column now called Pillar Rock, still about twenty miles from the sea. What they were seeing was the estuary, the wide mouth of the Columbia, where river meets tide. The ocean itself was still past the horizon.

The Pacific was out there. And it was about to fight back.

The Edge of the Continent

The last twenty miles were some of the hardest. Storms blew in off the Pacific. Huge waves and rolling logs pinned the party against the rocky north shore for days. Rain hardly stopped. Several of them got seasick, including Sacagawea. Clark called one miserable spot a dismal nitch, and that name is still on the map.

Anybody who's been on the water in a real blow knows that feeling. You're close enough to see where you're going, and the sea won't let you get there.

Finally, they reached a better camp near the river's mouth. On November 18th, Clark set out on foot with ten men and York. Charbonneau went along. Sacagawea did not. They walked to a headland called Cape Disappointment, and there, at last, they saw the open Pacific. Clark wrote that the men were astonished at "the high waves dashing against the rocks & this emence ocian."

Then came a choice. Where would they spend the winter?

On November 24th, the captains asked everyone, and Clark wrote each choice into a table in his journal. Historians still argue over whether to call it a vote. But York's choice was recorded right alongside the soldiers'. And so was Sacagawea's. Clark called her Janey. She was "in favour of a place where there is plenty of Potas." She meant wapato, a root the local people ate, something like a potato.

She had a say in where they'd winter beside the Pacific. She still hadn't laid eyes on it.

Winter at Fort Clatsop

They crossed to the south side of the Columbia, in what is now Oregon. While they scouted, Clark carved a message into a big pine tree. "William Clark December 3rd 1805. By Land from the U. States in 1804 & 1805."

By land. Ships had reached this coast before. Nobody had come overland from the United States. Among tall spruce and fir, they built a log fort and named it Fort Clatsop, after the Clatsop people nearby.

On Christmas Day, everyone moved into the new huts. Dinner, Clark wrote, was "pore Elk boiled, Spilt fish & Some roots." He called it "a bad Christmass diner."

It rained almost every day. Their clothes rotted. Fleas got into everything. A small team boiled seawater on the coast to make salt.

Then, in early January, word came that a whale had washed up on the coast. Clark would take a party in canoes to trade for blubber. Charbonneau would go.

And Sacagawea spoke up. Meriwether Lewis wrote down what she said, on January 6th, 1806.

"She observed that she had traveled a long way with us to see the great waters, and that now that monstrous fish was also to be seen, she thought it very hard she could not be permitted to see either."

She went.

Why It Still Matters

At the coast, Clark found only the skeleton of the whale, a hundred and five feet long, already stripped by the Tillamook people. From a mountain on the way, he wrote, he saw "in my frount a boundless Ocean."

In March, they turned for home, and in September 1806 they paddled into Saint Louis. Many people had given them up for dead.

The journey gave the young country its first real look at the West, and opened a future that would be devastating for the Native nations who fed and sheltered the Corps. York asked Clark for his freedom, and Clark refused for years. Sacagawea likely died around 1812, still young. Clark took responsibility for educating her son.

As a Navy veteran, I keep coming back to who got to see the water, and when.

Somewhere on that cold winter coast, at the edge of the continent, the woman who carried her son from the Missouri finally had the ocean in view.

Tomorrow: an American army sails from Virginia to land on the coast of Africa. Will the French guns on the beach hold their fire? The Daily Muster is supported by Parcaut Supply Co. Subscribe if this one stayed with you, and we'll muster again in the morning. Muster's done. Fair winds. I'm Ed Parcaut, and I'll see you tomorrow.