Ecola

The whale was the point. Two men from the saltmaking camp came back to Fort Clatsop on January 5, 1806, with blubber the coast people had given them, and Clark set out to buy more. Sacagawea asked to go. Lewis wrote that she had come a long way to see the great waters, and now that a monstrous fish could be seen as well, she thought it hard to be refused both. At the Tillamook village on this creek they found the skeleton, 105 feet long, the meat already being rendered, and bought what blubber and oil they could.

What the plaque says

Oregon History Ecola On January 8, 1806 William Clark and perhaps fourteen of the famous expedition reached a Tillamook village of five cabins on a creek which Captain Clark named Ecola or Whale Creek. Three days earlier, two men sent out from Fort Clatsop to locate a salt making site had brought back whale blubber given them by Beach Indians. Appreciating the welcome 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". Crossing a stream later named Elk Creek by early settlers, the food hunters found the whales 105-foot skeleton. Some oil and 300 pounds of blubber were bought from the Indians at "Ecola" Creek, who were busily rendering the whale meat with hot stones in wood troughs.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Haystack Rock — 2.1 mi
  A 235-foot sea stack made of lava that ran down the Columbia from the far side of the state, now a nesting rock for tufted puffins.
• Fort Clatsop — 16 mi
  The log post the Corps of Discovery named for its neighbors, and left to the Clatsop headman Coboway five days after stealing one of his people's canoes.
• Astoria Column — 20 mi
  A railroad's 1926 monument to its own route, wrapped in a 525-foot spiral of Oregon history that ends with the train pulling into Astoria.

More markers nearby

• Tsunami - Seaside — 5.7 mi
• Cannons on the Beach — 6.3 mi
• Fort Stevens State Park — 20 mi