Archaeologists Hot On The Trail Of Fort Clatsop Team Using Lewis And Clark’s Records To Find Oregon Campsite

“Ocian in view! O! the joy.”

So wrote William Clark in his journal, describing the moment when he, Meriwether Lewis and the other intrepid members of the Corps of Discovery sent to explore the West by President Thomas Jefferson came to the mouth of the Columbia River and the shore of the Pacific Ocean in the winter of 1805.

Their joy didn’t last very long. The arrival on the West Coast meant they had nothing to do but begin the long journey back - and for that they had to wait for the snows to melt in the Rocky Mountains. Bored, ill and homesick, the members of the expedition endured 3-1/2 months in a cramped log stockade known as Fort Clatsop.

Of the more than 600 sites where Lewis and Clark camped on their epic journey, no other place was as close to a permanent settlement. Yet despite the expedition’s exalted place in the American imagination, the fort’s exact location has never been found.

Now, a team of archaeologists from the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont., digging just southwest of here, has unearthed a collection of artifacts that provide tantalizing hints that the fort’s remains may soon be uncovered.

“We’ve only put three holes in the ground here and this is how much we’ve learned,” Ken Karsmizki, the leader of the dig, said recently as he stood in a 4-foot-deep hole that he and his associate, Annalies Corbin, have excavated. “We are trying to solve a puzzle that’s never been solved.”

Finding the precise spot where the Corps of Discovery completed its storied journey to the Pacific would fill a historic and emotional gap. For the many Americans still enthralled with the opening of the West, the bridging of a continent, and what is at its heart a great adventure story, this would be hallowed ground.

“As we approach the bicentennial of the expedition, we cannot say of anyplace with absolute certainty, ‘This is one of those places they camped, right here, right at this spot,”’ said Dayton Duncan, author of several books on the American frontier and the co-producer, with Ken Burns, of an upcoming Public Broadcasting Service series on the expedition. “We know where Pickett’s Charge was. We can stand on that place and know exactly where the different regiments were. That’s a sacred and important part of our national history.”

So far, with the sophisticated tools of modern archaeology - magnetometry and ground-penetrating radar - the most exciting finds the diggers have come up with are a brass bead, a blue bead, a musket ball and a pointed stick. All have more potential than may be immediately apparent. All require more research or more tests to determine their connection, if any, to the famous explorers.

Last week, for instance, Karsmizki received word that his musket ball was made from lead mined at the Buick Mine in Missouri. He can hardly wait to get to the National Archives in Washington to determine whether the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, W.Va., where Lewis and Clark stocked up on armaments, got its lead from that mine.

There is also evidence that the brass bead was manufactured in England in the pre-1820 period. And the faceted glass bead also seems a good bet, since Lewis and Clark noted in their journals how the local Chinook Indians preferred them in trade for their canoes and otter skins. (The glass bead actually was found by Ken Thomson, a National Park Service archaeologist digging separately nearby.)

The pit Karsmizki stands in as he talks also holds great promise, though to the untrained eye it looks like nothing more than a meticulously dug hole in the ground. But, as Karsmizki explains, the broadening triangle of dark-colored earth is evidence that someone - perhaps members of the Corps of Discovery - had a privy here. Tests of the soil may tell the tale.

All of these things, he acknowledges, could have no relation to Lewis and Clark, since others easily may have disturbed the site. English traders and Japanese fishermen blown off course came to this shore before Jefferson sent his explorers to see what he’d bought in the Louisiana Purchase and to search for an easy route to the Pacific. Shortly after the expedition, fur traders working for financier John Jacob Astor visited the ruins of Fort Clatsop. Settlers followed in the 1850s.

Karsmizki, a historical archaeologist from Montana State University’s museum, has spent 11 seasons trying to unearth another Lewis and Clark campsite at the lower portage on the Missouri River near Great Falls, Mont., an obstacle that took a month for the expedition to negotiate. In that time, Karsmizki has found three promising, but so far inconclusive, campfire sites.

Here on the Park Service site known as the Fort Clatsop National Memorial, things are proceeding, by contrast, at lightning speed.

Of course, Lewis and Clark scholarship is already deep, thanks in large part to the meticulous journals the explorers kept as they plumbed the geography and natural science of the plains and the Rockies.

Even so, Duncan and others believe that the possible discovery of Fort Clatsop will be an electrifying moment, at a time when Stephen Ambrose’s best-selling book on the expedition, “Undaunted Courage,” and the bicentennial early in the next century have stoked popular interest in Lewis and Clark.

Memorial Superintendent Cindy Orlando said visitation already is spiking upward in this relatively remote corner of northwest Oregon, with nearly 250,000 visitors a year.

As well-known as the explorers’ route across the country is, not a single campsite has been definitively identified. The only signature left on the landscape is Clark’s name inscribed on a 200-foot-high rock formation now known as Pompey’s Pillar, on the Yellowstone River east of Billings, Mont.

“People have been squeezing the journals for a long time,” Karsmizki said. “No one’s been squeezing the archaeological record. This is like a whole new set of journals.”