Weary of boiled elk and dog meat, Captain William Clark and a dozen other explorers left their winter encampment at Fort Clatsop on January 6, 1806, in search of the whale beached on present day Cannon Beach. This trek was the farthest west that any member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition traveled.
Led along Indian trails by a native guide, the party scaled the north slope of Tillamook Head. In his journal (January 7, 1806) Clark called it "the Steepest worst and highest mountain I ever ascended." Once past Ecola Creek (which Clark named ekkoli, the Chinook word for whale), the party continued south to where they found the "monstrous fish". Clark described it as nothing more than a Sceleton, of 150 feet long.
Local villagers were boiling the blubber and extracting oil from it, and Clark managed to barter for 300 pounds of blubber and a few gallons of oil.
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Sacagawea eagerly joined the exploration party. As Lewis wrote, "the Indian woman... observed that She had traveled a long way with us to See the great waters, and that now that monstrous fish was also to be Seen, She thought it very hard the she could not be permitted to see either (She had never yet been to the Ocean.)" — Meriwether Lewis' journal January 6 1806
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