Mossback’s Northwest: ‘The Graveyard of the Pacific’

Explorers looked for a great River of the West that could be a shortcut across the continent. They never found it. Perhaps that fueled a sense of frustration. In 1775 a Spanish explorer, Bruno Heceta, thought he saw the mouth of the Columbia, or maybe it was only a bay. So did a British trader named John Meares, who named a cape for his disappointment in not finding the river.

Captain James Cook, perhaps the greatest explorer of his age, sailed right passed it. To be fair, it was not at a latitude he was bound to explore. Others who should have found it missed it too, like Cook’s onetime midshipman, Capt. George Vancouver.

It became less of a disappointment to colonizers when American Robert Gray figured out it was a mighty river that might open the interior of the Pacific Northwest to trade and exploration. He dubbed it the Columbia after his ship. Even if it wasn’t the fabled Northwest passage, it was clearly important.

But it was tricky to navigate into and out of. If the river’s mouth was hard to discern from the sea, the rough waters made entering the river dangerous, and often deadly. The Columbia brings vast quantities of silt and gravel, and its shifting sandbars lay where the rough Pacific and its storms and tides meet the river’s enormous outflow. Getting in and out is notoriously hard. The Coast Guard still runs a lifeboat school near the Columbia’s mouth for rescue in heavy seas, the only school like it in the world.

You can still see the remains of shipwrecks here. Or hear stories of maritime disasters on the nearby coast, some going back to the 1600s. In settlement times, the sinking of the General Warren in 1852 was a much-remembered tragedy. The schooner-rigged sidewheel steamer left Astoria for San Francisco in bad weather and crossed the bar with an experienced pilot. It was ravaged by a January storm and turned back.

In a gale, and fighting an ebb tide and the river’s current, the General Warren was beached on Clatsop Spit, the river mouth’s southern shore. Nine men were sent to get help in the only lifeboat, but before help could arrive the steamer was battered to pieces by the breakers. The remaining 42 on board were all lost. An entry in The (online) Oregon Encyclopedia says that the wreck of the General Warren “perhaps more than any other” established “the Columbia Bar’s reputation for destructiveness.”

Other victims in the years followed with regularity in the next half-century: the schooner Rambler, the bark Leonese, the Makah, the Cousins, the Peter Iredale, all wrecked on the Spit. Since 1792, an estimated 2,000 ships have sunk at the Columbia’s mouth or on the nearby coastline, with hundreds of lives lost.

The river also wreaks a kind of geologic havoc under the ocean. During the last Ice Age, when sea level was hundreds of feet lower, the mouth of the river and the continental shoreline were another 40 or 50 miles further west, since submerged. And the river doesn’t end where you think it does: Its flow continues underwater. It’s helped carve the Astoria Canyon, an underwater abyss that extends some 75 miles out. The Columbia continues to shape our region above and below its surface.

The town of Astoria, Oregon, sits at the Columbia’s mouth and at the continent’s edge. It was the first U.S. settlement west of the Rocky Mountains, founded by John Jacob Astor’s fur company. Today, people visit to vacation on the Oregon coast and visit the Goonies House. Each winter, Northwest fisher/poets put down their nets to read their poetry and drink local brews. The hoarse barks and deep grunts of sea lions, gathered by the hundreds to eat salmon, provide a background chorus that forms a riverside soundtrack.

In 2012, a brawl between fishermen and loggers occurred in the street outside a local tavern. Here is still a vintage feel of an older, rustic Northwest. The world’s not perfect, but at the meeting place between mighty river and wind-whipped sea, it’s harder to feel disappointment.