Cape Disappointment

The Chinook, whose villages lined the north shore of the river's mouth, call this headland Kah'eese. John Meares, a British fur trader looking for the great river the Spanish had reported, sailed past it in July 1788, took the breakers across the entrance for the shore of a bay, and named the cape for how he felt. The river was there. Robert Gray crossed into it four years later, and the bar he crossed, where the Columbia's outflow meets Pacific swell over shifting sand, has wrecked enough ships since to be called the Graveyard of the Pacific.

Everything on the cape answers the bar. The lighthouse had a hard start: the ship carrying its materials sank a few miles from the site, and when the Fresnel lens arrived it was too big for the tower, which had to be rebuilt. It was lit on October 15, 1856, the first lighthouse in the Pacific Northwest, and ships coming down from the north still could not see it, so a second light went up at North Head, two miles on, in 1898. The Army reserved the cape in 1852 and put guns on it during the Civil War. In 1875 the post was renamed Fort Canby, for General Edward Canby, whom Kintpuash had shot at a peace tent in the Lava Beds two years earlier. It was deactivated in 1947 and became a state park.

The Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center stands among the old gun batteries on a cliff about 200 feet above the water, with a view straight down onto the bar. Below the cape on Baker Bay, Coast Guard Station Cape Disappointment has run the National Motor Lifeboat School since 1968, the only school in the country for heavy-weather surf rescue. It trains here because the bar can be counted on to be rough.