A Lifeway Now Vanished - Oregon Historical Markers on Waymarking.com

This sign is located at the Astoria Waterfront tower along the Astoria River Walk west of the Maritime Museum..

Marker Name: A Lifeway Now Vanished
Marker Text: The Corps of Discovery found a vibrant native culture along the Columbia’s broad estuary. The Clatsop and Chinook Indians were at the center of a vast trade empire that ran from the Rocky Mountains to Hawaii and the Orient. Contact with traders made the Indians “great higlers in trade,” noted Meriwether Lewis, “if they conceive you anxious to purchase (they) will be a whole day bargaining for a handfull of roots.”
The Indians of the lower Columbia built plank-slab houses in villages along the shore. With large seine nets, they harvested tremendous numbers of salmon.
They also took smelt with dipnets and used hooks-and-lines to catch sturgeon. Their use of dugout canoes, sculptural wood carvings, ownership of slaves, and emphasis on wealth linked them to the great Northwest Coast Culture.
The West’s First Anthropologists
President Jefferson instructed The Corps of Discovery to seek out Indian tribes and to record their customs, languages, populations, religions, food, clothing,and willingness to trade with Americans. While at Fort Clatsop during the winter of 1805-06, the expedition gave the world the first complete description of the lower Columbia’s native people. William Clark noted the effects of smallpox - within a generation of the expedition, the once-flourishing Chinookan family was seriously diminished in population due to smallpox and malaria epidemics.

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