ocean, Captain Lewis branded a tree with his name and the date, and a few days later Captain Clark says, "I marked my name on a large pine tree immediately on the isthmus, at Clatsop."
It was two hundred years since Captain John Smith sailed up the Chickahominy in Virginia in search of the South Sea. At last, far beyond the Chickahominy, Lewis and Clark sailed up the Missouri and down the Columbia in search of the same South Sea. And here at the mouth of the Oregon they found it, stretching away to China.
Balboa, Magellan, Cortez, Mackenzie,—Lewis and Clark had joined the immortals.
XVIII
FORT CLATSOP BY THE SEA
December had now arrived, and southwest storms broke upon the coast with tremendous force. Off Cape Disappointment, the surges dashed to the height of the masthead of a ship, with most terrific roaring. A winter encampment could no longer be delayed.
"Deer, elk, good skin, good meat," said the Chinook Indians, in pantomime, pointing across the bay to the south.
Accordingly, thither the eggshell boats were guided, across the tempestuous Columbia, to the little river Netul, now the Lewis and Clark, ten miles from the ocean.
Beside a spring branch, in a thick grove of lofty firs about two hundred yards from the water, the leather tent was set up and big fires built, while all hands fell to clearing a space for the winter cabins.
In four days the logs were rolled up, Boonsboro fashion, into shelters for the winter. "The foinest puncheons I iver saw," said Patrick Gass, head car
