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To Make Some Salt: Lewis and Clark on the Oregon Coast

© Thomas James Martin

. . .a cloudy morning, I took 5 men and set out to the Sea to find the nearest place & make a way to prevent our men getting lost and find a place to make salt. ~Captain William Clark, Corps of Discovery, December 8, 1805

Common salt has often played an exalted role in history. For example, in March of 1930, Gandhi started with a few followers on his great march to the sea to protest the British government's monopoly on salt production in India.

Roman soldiers were paid partly in salt, and one of the derivations of the word soldier is from the Latin sal dare, meaning to give salt. We get the word salary from the same Latin root.

The men of the Lewis and Clark Expedition valued salt highly as well. As the Corps of Discovery hunkered down to spend the winter of 1805-1806 at the hastily constructed quarters that they called Fort Clatsop, near what is now Seaside Oregon, many of the soldiers expressed a desire for salt to season their meat. The salt also helped to preserve the meat.

Captain Clark records that he did not care one way of the other about seasoning his rations with salt. I suppose he felt that the deer, bear, and occasional dog that they ate-along with some fish-all tasted the same anyway.

Nevertheless, he led some of his men back to the sea some 15 miles from Fort Clatsop in an area filled with game and wood, where for several weeks they made salt in the time-honored way. They filled pots with sea water and boiled it down until a residue of salt and other minerals remained.

They camped in tents near the mouth of the Necanicum River, about "100 paces" from the Pacific Ocean close to the grounds of the friendly Clatsop and Tillamook Indians. As recorded, "they commenced the makeing of salt and found that they could make from three quarts to a gallon a day."

All told, they made three and a half bushels to see them through the winter and the long journey back to St. Louis from where they started in 1803. On February 20, 1806 the seacoast camp was abandoned. Little remained beyond the stack of fire-blackened rocks which were once the furnace.

In 1900 the Oregon Historical Society established the forgotten site as a memorial to this aspect of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. The site is based on the remains of the old rock pile and the testimony of Jenny Michel, a Clatsop Indian born in 1816, who remembered her mother's stories of white men boiling water on that spot.

Salt Works near Seaside, Oregon

Fort Clatsop

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