190-mile length. Peering through the haze of late October, 1792, the English navigator, Lieutenant William R. Broughton, was first of all white men to sight the river's mouth. A member of the British maritime expedition of Captain George Vancouver, he had sailed up the "River of the West," the Columbia, beyond reach of his master's heavier-burdened vessel, and so entered the Willamette and its history.
Thirteen years passed before Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, overland trail-breakers to the unknown West, entered the Oregon Country. They and their men were destined to pass unknowingly the mouth of the river Willamette, both on the journey to and from the Pacific. Returning, their eyes intently eastward, they ascended the Columbia River as far as the mouth of the Sandy before they were aware of their oversight. On April 2, 1806, Captain Clark, he of the red thatch and the nimble but poor-spelling pen, was informed by visiting Indians of a "river which discharges itself into the Columbia on its south side some miles below us," and "runs a considerable distance to the south between the Mountains.” Clark thereupon took a small party and returned. He wrote in his Journal: “I entered this river ... called Multnomah ... from a nation who reside on Wappato Island, a little below the enterence.
The following day, the record shows, he proceeded a few miles upstream, but the mist over the gray waters was so thick he could see but a short distance up the bending river. Yet when he left he was “perfectly satisfied of the size of the magnitude of this great river which must water that vast tract of Country between the Western range of mountains and those, on the sea coast as far S. as the waters of California."
After the passing of Lewis and Clark over the curve of the continent, the name of the little-known river changed from Multnomah to Willamette—but sometimes with devious spellings; for so the stream was called by the trader-travel- ers, Gabriel Franchere, Alexander Ross and Ross Cox, all of whom left reputable records.
For the first dwellers along the Willamette—the native
races—the river had no name. Instead, areas of the green-
