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Home > History Museum > Lewis and Clark > Crossword Puzzle
What Did Lewis and Clark Know About the Columbia River and When Did They Know It?NOTE: The slideshow will appear in a separate popup window. If your browser is set to block pop-ups, you may need to change your settings to view the show. There were only two "known" facts about the Columbia River in the minds of Thomas Jefferson and Meriwether Lewis when the venture that became known as the Lewis & Clark expedition was launched, and one of those was mistaken. Though Robert Gray nominally "discovered" the Columbia River (named after his ship, Columbia Rediviva) the first published information about the "Great River of the West" in European and American circles was a function of George Vancouver's expedition to the Northwest Coast in 1792 on behalf of British imperial interests. One of Vancouver's lieutenants, Peter Puget, charted the sound that bears his name. Another, William Broughton, charted the Columbia River as far upstream as present day Washougal, Washington. Broughton deduced, incorrectly, that the headwaters of the river named by Gray took their source on the heights of Mount Hood, a feature he named for a now obscure British naval figure. Vancouver's exploratory narrative and atlas were published in 1798. In the meantime, Alexander Mackenzie, on behalf of the Montreal based Northwest Company (a fur trading enterprise) ventured overland in present day Canada, reaching the Pacific near Bella Coola in 1793. Mackenzie had previously (1789) tried to reach the Pacific but coursed down a river that, to his dismay, took him to the Arctic--a river now named after Mackenzie. In 1793, near present day Prince George, BC, Mackenzie came upon a large southward flowing river. The resident Indians told Mackenzie it would be madness to run the rapids in front of him and so he took a shortcut to the coast, emerging at Bella Coola. In his narrative, Mackenzie revised the Broughton/Vancouver theory relative to the headwaters of the Columbia and deduced that he had been on uppermost extent of the Columbia, and published a map to that effect. In fact, however, Mackenzie had struck what we know today as the Fraser River. When President Jefferson ordered Lewis into the field (later complemented by William Clark) he had the War Department (predecessor of the Department of Defense) draw up a map of the known geography of the northern west. This was compiled by Nicholas King, principal cartographyer for the United States at that time. King incorporated many features from Vancouver's and Mackenzie's field work, but added a mysterious southern fork of the Columbia. This was not completely unfounded speculation on King's part, as all major rivers have a series of tributaries, much like the Missisippi, which has a "western fork" (the Missouri) and an "eastern fork" (the Ohio). Lewis and Clark rather wishfully presumed that the "southern fork" of the Columbia was the main stem of the Great River of the West. However, upon reaching the "forks" of the Columbia near the present Pasco, Washington, they learned to their dismay, that they had in fact been on the junior stream in terms of flow. (Nevertheless, what has come to be called the Snake River is actually longer than the Columbia above the forks.) The imperial consequences of this realization loomed large in the minds of the captains in that the Columbia, though "discovered" by Gray, had been successfully charted by Vancouver, and worse, Mackenzie had seemingly been at the headwaters of the Great River of the West, possibly trumping Gray's accomplishment. For this reason, what should have been a triumphal moment in the journals of the expedition—reaching the penultimate objective, the great Columbia River—was a muted occasion, one which also caused the captains to edit their journals and maps to avoid embarrassment. Dave Nicandri
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