January 8, 1806. Captain William Clark is with a small party from the Corps of Discovery standing atop a steep, rocky headland jutting into the Pacific Ocean. They are a day’s-plus walk south of their winter encampment near the mouth of the Columbia River. Gazing at the scene below, he later writes in his diary: We set out early and proceeded to the top of the mountain facing the open sea. A boundless ocean lay before me. I beheld the grandest and most pleasing view my eyes ever surveyed. As far as I could see, the seas were raging with immense waves breaking with great force upon the rocks north. South, I have a view of white sands for a great distance. There are rocks of immense size out from the shore against which the seas break. Villages of Nehalem and Clatsop can be seen below. One is a village at the mouth of a small river near the place the whale is said to be.
Reports of a dead whale having washed ashore just south of the headland reached Clark at the encampment he and Captain Meriwether Lewis established a month ago. During the past year and a half, the co-captains led a disciplined corps of explorers west from St. Louis, up the Missouri River, across the Rocky Mountains, and down the great Columbia River to their winter encampment a few miles in from where the river meets the sea. They are exploring lands newly purchased under President Jefferson from the French government of Napoleon Bonaparte. They need provisions during this wettest of winters while they wait to start home in the spring. Clark is eager to bargain for a portion of the butchered whale. He had tasted whale earlier and found it very palatable and tender.
The whale is beached near a Nehalem village along the estuary of a large creek. People from the several villages up and down the coast are already butchering and parceling out the meat and blubber among themselves. It is an old tradition. Clark is in for some hard bargaining to get the meat he wants. After taking in the scene from the mountain, the party continues down the south slope on a well-established trail they have been following all day. The trail connects several Native villages along this abundant Pacific coastal land.
I am almost five. My father calls me Little Bird. I am the youngest and his favorite. He is Clatsop. Mother is Nehalem. Our family lives beside the ocean in a village of longhouses where the creek flows down from the forested hills of giant spruce. I delight in how the creek spreads across the sandy beach enjoying its rambles before entering the sea. It plays upon the sands like I do, running up and down, not ready to leave when the time comes. But right now, I am watching strange men emerging from the edge of the forest. They are coming out where the trail hugs the creek waters. They are not us. I have heard villagers talking about those who canoed from the east down the big river up north. They are wintered on the other side of the mountain. My father says they have come for some of the whale. He will bargain with them, for our people are long-time traders, but villagers from south and north are here to share in this great beast. The forests and waters feed us well and so we prosper. For generations, people from many lands have come to bargain for our goods. We trade what we can for things that we need. Everyone benefits.
After bartering as best they could and spending the night on the north side of the creek away from the village, Clark and his party depart, hauling a few hundred pounds of whale blubber and rendered oil. They could not get the meat they wanted. After trudging back over the forested headland, they spend the rest of the winter encamped in their stockade fort enduring soaking rains. Two months later, on March 23, the Corps of Discovery, under co-command of Captains Lewis and Clark, breaks camp for the long trek home. They are leaving a coastal area of thriving communities that have been trading goods throughout the Columbia-Pacific region for ages.
It was natural for the Clatsops and Nehalems to welcome Lewis and Clark, much like they had welcomed European explorers who had come to their shores earlier. They were part of a prosperous network of villages, from Tillamook Bay to Willapa Bay, who traded along the coast and up the river to The Dalles. Theirs was a thriving society of commerce. They bartered with each other and with the British and American traders who regularly anchored ships in the lower Columbia to exchange goods with the villagers. Hence, the Clatsops and Nehalems found it curious that Lewis and Clark had not come to trade. They were not sure what to make of them.
Like Lewis and Clark, the Americans who came overland were different from the men who came by sea to conduct business. Those who came by land wanted more than bartered goods. They wanted territory. These newcomers had no intention of sharing in a common humanity for the common good with those who had cared for the land and all that lay upon it for thousands of years. Theirs was a culture of enterprise and conquest. They saw the conquest of people and nature as their manifest destiny.
The network of established coastal villages left behind by Lewis and Clark was already becoming decimated by diseases brought by European and American visitors and by hostilities that occurred among tribes and newcomers. Among the newcomers were American fur trappers who built a fort on the Columbia River that became the city of Astoria. British and American trappers alike were meeting a huge demand for beaver pelts back in their home countries. The popularity of pelts rapidly led to the beaver’s decline, but by mid-19th century the era of fur trapping was mostly over.
In the 1830s, American pioneer families were arriving. These settlers wanted the land for homesteads and towns and the natural resources for wealth. Those that settled in the lower Columbia region cut away the giant, old-growth trees and fished out the abundant runs of salmon within decades. The Native populations had dwindled during the encroachment of earlier British and Americans. Those Clatsops and Nehalems who remained were forced by the settlers into newly formed, small villages which were out of the way of the American intruders who wanted the land for themselves.
In Astoria, on Coxcomb Hill, a victory column pokes skyward. Tall and monumental, it honors the settlers’ bravery and triumph over hardship, their defeat of those in the path of destiny, and their occupation of lands that once were the home of others. The column is modeled after Emperor Trajan’s column on Quirinal Hill in Rome. Trajan built his column to honor his defeat of the Kingdom of Dacia, which extended Rome’s empire to the Black Sea, much as the American doctrine of manifest destiny extended its territory to the Pacific Ocean. Trajan’s column and the Astoria column are practically twins. The Roman defeat of Dacia was almost two-thousand years ago. The devastation of the Clatsop and Nehalem peoples is still fresh.
My father called me Little Bird. When I was barely five, playing alongside the creek that ran by our village, I watched the men who were not us walk off into the forest with the whale blubber and oil that my father had sold to them. They did not get the meat they wanted. They were not as skilled at bartering as the artful traders from the big ships. Soon after, others like them came to trap the beaver. They built a fort they called Astoria near the great river. When I was older, my parents died in a skirmish that was part of a great conflict that I did not understand. No one ever told me what happened, but I was taken to a convent in the valley over the mountains. Much later, my tribe found me and brought me home. My people were surprised by the new ways in which I dressed and had learned to cook, but I did not mind. I am still proud to say that I am Clatsop. My father was Clatsop. My mother was Nehalem. I married a Nehalem man, who is now dead. We lived together for many years in a village on the north shore of Tillamook Bay. Our children are now old or dead. Our grandchildren are more like those who are not us than they are like the people we once were. And I am old, almost one hundred years. The village I knew as a child is gone. There was a change in the wind after those who are not us wintered nearby. No one saw the storm coming. Those who came on the winds of change destroyed all that we were. They pushed us out of our homes and off our land, leaving us in poverty. Few of us remain. We live now as refugees, relocated in small villages, set aside out of their way. They do not want us here. But here we are until we are no more. Our spirit lies upon the land.
Stretched along the white sands just south of Tillamook Head, the coastal town of Cannon Beach, Oregon is bisected by Ecola Creek. Captain William Clark named the creek Ecola, which means whale in the language of those who once lived here. The old Cannon Beach grade school sits atop the grounds of the Nehalem village where Clark once bartered for whale blubber and some rendered oil. He got the worst of the deal, but in the end those who followed his path west took everything from the Clatsops and Nehalems. The Nehalems largely lived south of the headland and the Clatsops largely lived north. They intermarried and were culturally and economically entwined. Almost annihilated, their few heirs have formed the Clatsop-Nehalem Confederated Tribes of Oregon, though still unrecognized and ignored by the United States government.
Today when entering the town of Cannon Beach from the north, you come face-to-face with the former Cannon Beach Elementary School as you cross the bridge at Ecola Creek. The 1950s-era buildings, vacated as a school in 2013, are dominated by an imposing Quonset-hut-styled gymnasium covered in cedar shingles, reminiscent of the old longhouses once lived in on this land by Nehalem and Clatsop families. Now owned by the City of Cannon Beach, a process is underway to give the property new purpose as a community site. The grounds include a great swath of green space identified by a canoe-shaped sign as NeCus’ Park. Here was the village of NeCus’ that was visited by Clark and company on that fateful day in January of 1806. It was an active, prosperous village of about one hundred Nehalem and Clatsop people living in several longhouses. Others visited from their own villages as they traveled the coastline on foot or by canoe. NeCus’ Village was a natural place to stop before confronting Tillamook Head by water or land. It was a welcoming place for all.
The town of Cannon Beach is currently discussing how best to use the site. There are multiple suggestions as one can imagine, but almost universal is the desire to recognize its Clatsop and Nehalem heritage. The Clatsop-Nehalem Confederated Tribes are deeply involved in how to represent their culture and history at the site. Ultimately, these hallowed lands of an ancient people must tell the story of those who once lived here. In 2016, the town and the tribes joined in erecting a ten-foot pole the city commissioned to commemorate the site as a welcoming place. The pole is a wooden carving of a tribal member awaiting visitors along the creek. It represents NeCus’ Village as a place for all to gather and is a reminder that we must never forget the importance of place and its use for the common good.
America today is struggling with its bitter history of vanquishing native populations. As the young country expanded westward in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark, it wiped out the people and cultures of indigenous nations who had been on the land for many generations. NeCus’ Village was a small part of this conquest. The country now wrestles with knowing that it has fallen far short of the ideals inscribed in its founding documents to support the right of all people to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness under the constitutional banner of equality and justice. These rights are no longer just for some people and not for everyone. There is momentum afoot in the American ethos to be a more humane nation. Corrections to its harsh past are being made nationally and locally. Just recently, for the first time, a Native American, Deb Haaland, is overseeing the lands that once were her ancestors’ as she fulfills her role as Secretary of the Interior.
Locally, in Cannon Beach, the site of its old school is seen as an opportunity to help revive a Native heritage once trashed by empire building. NeCus’ Village was a victim of a young nation’s expansionist doctrine. Awakening the spirit of NeCus’ can be a small step in helping America become a beacon of common humanity for the common good in a global world. The NeCus’ Park welcoming pole stands ready as a testament to a new time, watching for the moment to arrive when everyone on American soil can live freely and equally. Reviving the spirit of the welcoming pole and the place on which it stands is a small contribution to America’s larger effort. On these ancient grounds along a wandering creek at the base of a headland where a dead whale once floated ashore there is hope that some progress can be made toward reviving a spirit of goodwill that cares for the land and its peoples. A burgeoning American heritage of cultural diversity and respect for nature is sprouting. It is being nurtured in villages such as Cannon Beach where the spirit of NeCus’ lies upon the land.
What is happening in a small town on the upper left edge of Oregon to promote the history of a former Native village and its people will help make a difference in America’s struggle to mend its ways. Repairing a local rip in history helps mend the whole fabric. The repair will be but a patch on an ancient garment, but when visitors arrive at this site, as they once did years ago, they will be greeted in the spirit of kind consideration for who they are and what they offer. It will not matter where they came from or how they got here. All will join in celebration of a place that holds dear what it means to be welcomed. That is the spirit of NeCus’. That is the celebration of life for the good of all. The ancient garment torn by conquest many years ago will never be the same, but it can be patched. The spirit of NeCus’ is inspiration for what is coming soon to this ancient place along a wandering creek where a little girl once ran up and down along its rambling waters.
© April 2021, Darrell Clukey
I’m mighty grateful Darrell for this hearty turn-around from the old newspeak about Lewis and Clark, those celebrity tourists paid by imperialists to blaze a trail for extractive commerce. We are overdo for a new tourism that models hospitality not subservience, reciprocity not conquest. Cross-cultural gatherings at NeCus’ can help us welcome ways forward, deep into the survival of our shared humanity.
Thank you, Darrell, for your historic essay. Very insightful! As a relatively new citizen of Cannon Beach, it helps to ground my sense of place and resolve to support efforts to recognize and revere our native cultures.
Watt and Steve, thank you for the comments. They are appreciated. I also appreciate the inspiration and advice of Dr. Doug Deur in writing this piece. His scholarship of the indigenous people of the NW coastal region is well noted. What I had in mind in writing the essay is that all people can benefit when they find common good in their common humanity. Then there is a better chance for shared prosperity, like in the butchering of a beached whale along the banks of Ecola Creek by villagers from up and down the coast. Now it might be more fitting to hold a community potluck in NeCus’ Park to share in the abundance of the region. Either way, people benefit when they work together for the common good of all.