August 1958 | Volume 9, Issue 5 As the state of Oregon nears its
one hundredth anniversary, the realm where the Tonquin ’s
wayfarers experienced some of their bitter hardships is about to
be added to our series of national historic shrines. The event
will salute not the first permanent settlement of Americans at
the mouth of the Columbia River, which was that of the Pacific
Fur Company in 1811, but one which even preceded it. This was
Fort Clatsop, a 50-foot-square log stockade built by Lewis and
Clark during the stormy winter of 1805–6, abandoned when they
paddled back up the Columbia toward distant civilization, and
visited by the Astor Argonauts from the doomed Tonquin five or
six years later. Deserted, Fort Clatsop eventually succumbed to
the prodigious growth of the “rain forest.” Its last vestiges,
even its foundations, disappeared. But in 1955, to herald the
sesquicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the fort was
rebuilt by community enterprise to the exact specifications in
the expedition’s f