Ecola

On January 8, 1806, William Clark and perhaps fourteen members of the famous expedition reached a Tillamook village of five cabins on a creek Clark named Ecola, or Whale Creek. Three days earlier, two men sent out from Fort Clatsop to locate a salt-making site had returned with whale blubber given them by beach Indians. Welcoming this addition to the explorers’ diet, Clark set out to find the whale or buy its blubber. Traveling a perilous trail across Tillamook Head, the food hunters, including Sacajawea and a young Indian guide, descended to “a butifull sand shore.” After crossing a stream later named Elk Creek by early settlers, they found the whale’s 105-foot skeleton. At Ecola Creek they bought some oil and 300 pounds of blubber from the Indians, who were busily rendering the whale meat with hot stones in wood troughs.

Oregon · United States