Toward Cannon Beach

by Jon Burch Photography

Title

Toward Cannon Beach

Artist

Jon Burch Photography

Medium

Photograph - Digital Capture

Description

The first recorded journey by a European to what is now Cannon Beach was made by William Clark, one of the leaders of the Lewis and Clark Expedition wintering at Fort Clatsop, roughly 20 miles to the north near the mouth of the Columbia River in early 1806. The previous year, two members of the expedition had returned to camp with blubber from a whale that had beached several miles south, near the mouth of Ecola Creek. Clark later explored the region himself and from a spot near the western cliffs of the headland he saw "the grandest and most pleasing prospects which my eyes ever surveyed, in front of a boundless Ocean." That viewpoint, later dubbed "Clark's Point of View," can be accessed by a hiking trail from Indian Beach in Ecola State Park. That viewpoint is about 100 yards from where this image was made.

Clark and several of his companions, including Sacagawea, a Lemhi Shoshone woman, who accompanied the Lewis and Clark Expedition acting as an interpreter and guide completed a three day journey on January 10, 1806 to the site of the beached whale. They there encountered a group of Native Americans from the Tillamook tribe who were boiling blubber for storage. Clark and his party met with them and successfully bartered for 300 pounds of blubber and some whale oil before returning to Fort Clatsop.

Clark later applied the name "Ekoli," a Chinook word for "whale," to what is now Ecola Creek. There is wooden whale sculpture commemorating the encounter between Clark's group and the Tillamook tribe in a small park at the northern end of Hemlock Street in town. Early settlers later renamed the creek "Elk Creek", and a community with the same name formed nearby.

In 1846, a cannon from the US Navy schooner Shark washed ashore just north of Arch Cape, a few miles to the south of the community. The schooner hit land while attempting to cross the Columbia Bar, also known as the "Graveyard of the Pacific." The cannon, rediscovered in 1898, eventually inspired a name change for the growing community. In 1922, Elk Creek was renamed Cannon Beach - after the name of the beach that extends south of Ecola creek for eight miles, ending at Arch Cape - at the insistence of the Post Office Department because the name was frequently confused with Eola. Elk Creek itself was renamed Ecola Creek to honor William Clark's original name.

The cannon is now housed in the city's museum and a replica of it can be seen alongside U.S. Highway 101. Two more cannons, also believed to have been from the Shark, were discovered on Arch Cape over the weekend of February 16, 2008.

U.S. Highway 101 formerly ran through Cannon Beach. In 1964, a tsunami generated by a Good Friday Earthquake came ashore along the coast of the Pacific Northwest. The subsequent flooding inundated parts of Cannon Beach and washed away the highway bridge located on the north side of city. The city, now isolated from the highway, decided to attract visitors by holding a sand castle contest - an event that still continues annually every June.

Image copyright 2013 Jon Burch Photography

Uploaded

May 17th, 2013

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