Boundaries
by Jack Nisbet

Jack Nisbet is the author of The Mapmaker's Eye, Sources of the River, Purple Flat Top, Singing Grass, Burning Sage and Visible Bones. His newest, The Collector, won a 2010 PNBA Award.

Crossing the Bar
June 2010

The Columbia River is about 1250 miles long, and drains an immense area of the Intermountain West. For somewhere around 13 thousand years, between the end of the last Ice Age and the beginning of the dam building era in the early 20th century, the Columbia flowed steadily from its source lakes to the sea. It never had a smooth ride, however, as local geology slowed and twisted its course all the way along: from Dalles de Mort to Kettle Falls, from Priest Rapids to Celilo through the Dalles, tribal travelers named and portaged these difficult barriers. The first white visitors who had to deal with our now-drowned local rapids worked for the fur trade, and with tribal help they made an art out of getting around the rocks. The fact that occasional reports of battered bateaus, lost goods, and tragic drownings filtered into fur trade journal entries was considered a necessary part of the business.

To maximize their profits, traders from Alexander Mackenzie onward dreamed of sending Columbia District Beaver pelts around the world via sailing ship. Any attempt to do that would require facing one more terrifying barrier: the boundary between the river and the Pacific Ocean. Boston sea otter captains began sticking their noses inside in the late 1700s, but establishing a permanent post at the mouth of the Columbia, and sending regular ships in and out of the river, proved a different matter altogether.

In spring 1811 the Pacific Fur Company vessel Tonquin, owned by New York businessman John Jacob Astor, lost two dories and most of their oarsman during a hair-raising attempt to cross the Columbia River bar. Although the furmen on board the Tonquin eventually forced their way into the river's estuary and built a trading post they named Astoria, they remained gun-shy of the imposing bar.

In the fall of 1811, Astor outfitted the vessel Beaver to resupply his men at Astoria. Captain Cornelius Sowle was a Rhode Island native who been around the Horn twice and sailed all the way to China, but he had never seen the Columbia. On board the Beaver were five young clerks, including two who wrote accounts of the journey: 18-year old Irish immigrant Ross Cox and a recent college dropout named Alfred Seton. Both described a voyage peppered with petty squabbles, the appearance of scurvy on board, and two seamen washed away in a storm, as well as a refreshing stop in Hawaii, where the Beaver signed on 26 islanders to serve as both sailors and fur trade voyageurs.

It was May 6, 1812, when Ross Cox "had the happiness of beholding the entrance of the long-wished-for Columbia." Captain Sowle fired signal guns to alert the Astorians of his arrival, but received no answer, and breakers on the river bar seemed far too intimidating to tackle at first rush.

In light winds the following day, Sowle tacked just off the bar, firing more cannon signals at regular intervals; when he heard no return shots he retreated to a safer position offshore. On May 8th, he dispatched the jolly boat (an oared dory) to sound a channel and put out buoys to guide his course across the bar. Around midday the jolly boat returned to Beaver with the report they had heard answering fire from on shore, and late that afternoon the crew was delighted to see a white flag raised from Cape Disappointment on the north, or Washington, side of the bar. Beaver's first mate urged Captain Sowle to take a run for the river, but the captain decided to back off again and see what the morning might bring.

According to the daybook from Astoria, the men on shore had begun firing guns as soon as they sighted ship's sails, and were disappointed when the Beaver failed to come across the bar on her own. Chief agent Duncan McDougall decided that the captain "seemed to be in expectation of our sending out a pilot" to guide Beaver across the breakwater. Therefore McDougall and seven men rowed their own recently-constructed "barge" (another oared dory) across to a Chinook village on the north shore, "to try to prevail on some Indians to go out to the vessel if she neared the river, or if this was impracticable to make them signals." With evening approaching, the Astorian crew climbed the rocky hill of Cape Disappointment and "set fire to several trees to serve in lieu of a lighthouse."

Next morning, after the men on board the Beaver had set out their jolly boat for more soundings, they watched a Chinook dugout canoe head out across the bar, followed by the barge full of rowing Astorians. Standing up in the dugout was none other than Chief Concomly himself, a headman who had met everyone from George Vancouver to Lewis and Clark to David Thompson. Blind in one eye but adept at both navigation and negotiation, Concomly managed to relate that the people coming behind his canoe were white like the men on the ship, and that they had a house on shore.

Within the hour, Ross Cox found himself shaking hands with Duncan McDougall and an Astorian clerk named Donald McLennan, who apparently thought he was a competent mariner as well. Cox reported that McLennan "took charge of the ship as pilot; and at half-past two p.m. we crossed the bar, on which we struck twice without sustaining any injury." The Beaver dropped anchor in Bakers Bay, in the lee of Cape Disappointment on the north side of the Columbia. Although the cautious Captain Sowle refused to sail across to Fort Astoria to unload his $30,000 worth of cargo, this trip did mark the first documented use of local knowledge to get a ship safely across what even then was considered one of the most dangerous navigation hazards in the world.

Though it is impossible to convey the terror of a small boat facing up to the white line of breakers that marks the change from river to ocean, a map at the entrance to the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria does a fair job of introduction. The chart is covered with the names and dates of many - but by no means all - of the ships that have gone down trying to make the crossing. Links to larger photographs of battered vessels and stories of selected disasters fill the hall, and from inside the museum proper the sounds of huge waves crashing and radio distress calls beckon excited children into the darkness. The Maritime Museum exhibit "Crossing the Bar" has just opened, and pieces of flotsam and jetsam are on display there for all to see. To think that every fur pack gathered in the North Columbia country for half a century came downriver and went out this way is almost beyond belief.

Meanwhile, outside the windows of the museum, the adventure continues as large ships move goods in and out of the big river. The Columbia River Bar Pilots, founded in 1846, constitute the oldest continuously run business in the Northwest. The 15 pilots on staff - successors of Chief Concomly and Donald McLennan - do their work with a calm efficiency in the face of those same big waves and nasty weather.

To witness the two-century old process, all a visitor has to do is stand out on the pier between the museum and watch a refitted Foss tug, with a sign PILOT sturdily fitted on the rear deck, chug out to make an exchange on every large vessel, coming and going, that cruises past. The river often looks rough, and the hop up a rope ladder dicey, but remember: this is the Inside. If you drive out to Illwaco on the Washington side and scramble up to the Cape Disappointment lighthouse, you can watch a 71-foot yellow or orange jet boat, also marked PILOT, pound out through the tidal slop that marks the ever-changing ebb and flow of fresh and salt water. There is one man on board the jet boat who is about to leap through time.

The Columbia River Maritime Museum's exhibit "Crossing the Bar" is now on display in Astoria. Go to crmm.org for details.

Illustration by Emily Nisbet

Jack Nisbet's Homepage