Following Lewis and Clark: Tying together some frayed ends of history

MEGLER, Pacific County — Rex Ziak is driving west on Highway 401, within sight of the Astoria Bridge, when he stops his pickup truck by a thicket of alders on the Washington side of the Columbia River.

He peers into a dark tangle of trees and boulders, a gloomy, sunless scene, like something from an old black-and-white film.

"It may not look like much, but this is one of the most significant spots on the entire Lewis and Clark Trail," Ziak says. "This is Clark's Dismal Nitch."

There is no such place name on Washington state highway maps. But soon there will be.

Dismal Nitch, where the Corps of Discovery was pinned down for six desperate days in November 1805, is one of a handful of sites that form the new Lewis and Clark National and State Historical Parks near the mouth of the Columbia River.

The parks complex — combining state and federal properties in Southwest Washington and across the Columbia in Oregon — rewrites the history of Lewis and Clark's westward journey. And in the process, the updated history may reroute a section of Highway 101, though that plan has encountered a snag in the form of another historical find.

Major units of America's newest national park include:

• An expanded Fort Clatsop National Memorial, near Astoria, Ore., where the Corps of Discovery spent the rainy winter of 1805-06.

• Clark's Dismal Nitch (just across Highway 401 from the Megler Safety Rest Area, about 1.4 miles east of the Astoria Bridge).

• Station Camp (also on the Washington side of the Columbia, just west of the Astoria Bridge). This is where the expedition camped for several days — and took a historic vote that included participation by York, Capt. William Clark's black slave, and Sacagawea, the Shoshone Indian who joined the expedition and carried her infant son on the journey.

The Station Camp site was in the news in recent days after state archaeologists halted the Highway 101 project, at least temporarily, because they discovered a rich trove of Indian artifacts and trade goods at the project site. Plans were to move a half-mile or so of 101 there to create a riverside park commemorating the Station Camp vote. David Nicandri, director of the Washington State Historical Society, has described Station Camp as "the Independence Hall of the American West."

• Cape Disappointment, the ocean overlook near present-day Ilwaco, Pacific County, where both William Clark and Meriwether Lewis first viewed the North Pacific while searching for a suitable winter-camp locale.

Ziak (pronounced Zeek), a Pacific County historian who crusaded for recognition of the oft-overlooked Lewis and Clark campsites, says the national park is sure to be a major visitor attraction within a year or so.

"It's hot," he says. "Travelers will look across this vast and beautiful river and understand exactly what happened here. This park puts all the pieces together, like the last act of a great drama."

History's bottom line, as Ziak sees it: Pinned down at Dismal Nitch by vicious weather, and hungry, cold and discouraged, the 33 members of the Corps of Discovery could have perished before reaching the ocean.

"Instead," says Ziak, "it turns out to be an amazing story of courage and survival, a desperate struggle with a happy ending."

A dismal speller

Dismal Nitch, a forlorn cranny near today's Astoria Bridge, got its name from a Nov. 15, 1805, entry in Clark's journal.

In describing how the Corps of Discovery finally managed to escape Dismal Nitch that day, Clark wrote that the expedition's canoes were launched hastily when the wind calmed and the explorers "Set Out from this dismal nitch where we have been confined for 6 days ... "

Clark didn't officially name Dismal Nitch. Congress gave it that name last November in the bill that created the Lewis and Clark park complex. So now, even with Clark's misspelling of nitch (niche), that is the name of record.

Ziak describes Clark's Dismal Nitch as the "missing link" in most accounts of the Lewis and Clark adventure. Ziak, 51, author, lecturer and award-winning cinematographer, lives in the small town of Naselle. His fascination — make that obsession — with the Lewis and Clark story has cost him dearly over the years, so much so that he describes himself laughingly as "self-unemployed." But he is thrilled with what he has been able to learn about the expedition's final surge toward the sea.

What hooked Ziak's interest was the fact that the expedition, traveling in five Indian-style canoes, moved swiftly down the Columbia River, then on reaching Pacific County stalled for several critical days.

"We made 34 miles to day," Clark reported on Nov. 7, 1805. That was the day of this triumphant journal entry: "Great joy in camp we are in view of the Ocian, this great Pacific Ocean which we have been So long anxious to See ... "

(Actually, the explorers were seeing the Columbia's estuary, not the ocean, that day from the Pillar Rock area in Washington's Wahkiakum County.)

"There must have been great excitement with every paddle stroke after Pillar Rock," Ziak says. "They expected to reach the ocean the same day."

But it would be weeks before they were able to complete the journey.

"I couldn't do the math — I had to know what happened during the time they were not able to make any progress," Ziak says.

Mystery solved

For several years, he traced and retraced the explorers' time in what now is Pacific County, studying Clark's journal entries word by word, mile by mile. Finally, he was able to solve the puzzle. The expedition, it turned out, was stranded by stormy weather at Dismal Nitch from Nov. 10 until Nov. 15. It was impossible to navigate the fragile canoes around the headland now called Point Ellice, where the Astoria Bridge meets the Washington shore of the Columbia.

"The men were camping there in heavy rain and thunderstorms," Ziak says. "The (river) waves were so high they had to weight down their canoes with rocks. More rocks were tumbling down a steep hill into camp. Their (leather) clothing was in tatters, rotting on their bodies. They were short on food. They could go no farther. It must have been heartbreaking. And they were so close to their goal."

William Clark's descriptions of those difficult days read like lines from a dreary diary: "We are all wet and disagreeable ... Our present Situation a very disagreeable one ... waves are increasing to Such a height that we cannot move from this place."

Soon, Ziak says, Clark's Dismal Nitch will be marked with interpretive signs for visitors. And the Station Camp area — if the project proceeds — will become a grassy park with interpretive signs and walking trails. The few visitors who stop by Station Camp now have to dodge fast traffic on Highway 101 to reach the edge of the riverscape — thus the desire to detour around the site with a new section of highway.

"This is the real end of the Lewis and Clark Trail," Ziak says. "And now we know the whole story."

Stanton H. Patty, a Vancouver, Wash., writer, is the retired assistant Travel editor of The Seattle Times.