Clatsop gets rugged new look

SALEM – A replica of Fort Clatsop to be unveiled today will be more rugged than one built in the 1950s, which burned a year ago.

Even so, what workers built over the past year using some power tools re-creates a fort that took Lewis, Clark and their party two weeks to throw together.

“I think we now have an appreciation for how really ragged that fort might have looked,” said Chip Jenkins, the superintendent of Lewis and Clark National Historic Park. “We had the experience of hand-carrying the logs, but after how it went for us even with power tools to cut the notches, I think theirs was very rough.”

The corps led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark wintered at Fort Clatsop, in miserable weather, before heading back east in 1806. A replica of the fort was built in 1955. It burned Oct. 3, 2005.

The ends of the logs on the 1955 fort were cut off square with saws, but the new fort looks like a beaver has chewed off all the ends.

The Lewis and Clark expedition built the fort with axes and adzes, which are axes with sideways blades. Jenkins said historians think the corps left all but one small saw cached east of the Rocky Mountains.

Workers even used their hand tools to rough up some of the lumber for doors, jambs and window frames.

Pete Field, manager of the rebuilding project, said the original fort would have been more irregular. “The ends of some of the logs might have been just broken off,” he said. “They certainly didn’t take time making it pretty.”

Jenkins said that in 1805, the explorers were desperate for shelter.

“You have to remember that it rained every day, and what they were living under were rotting elk hides, and they moved into the fort after two weeks because, probably, the conditions were marginally better than sleeping under a rotting elk hide.”

The replica was built on the foundation poured for the first. Park officials and historians think the site is very near the one Lewis and Clark chose.

Jenkins said the daughter of homesteaders “remembered the moldering pile of logs that her father actually burned because it was in his way of farming,” and the location was recorded by an early historical society.