Children of both emigrants and Indians are heirs of a sacred land

By DAVID HORSEY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL CARTOONIST

Editor’s note: This is the last of a seven-part series.

DISPATCH FROM CAPE DISAPPOINTMENT, Sept. 26 — The fog stirs out on the Pacific Ocean, but the late afternoon sun still shines above. Here on this breezy bluff where a lighthouse stands to guide ships into the mouth of the Columbia River, I have come to the end of the road.

This little peninsula is the southwestern tip of Washington. It is as far west as Meriwether Lewis and William Clark could go. After this, it was just a matter of waiting 3 1/2 rainy, tedious months inside Fort Clatsop until they could start their long trek home.

My homeward trek is not nearly as far because the Northwest is my home. I grew up with these rocky beaches and dark forests, with the rain and the sea. As I have driven the long road from Lemhi Pass, I’ve thought about how that came to be, how my family’s history fits into the saga of the great migration that followed after Lewis and Clark.

Since legend so often precedes history, I’ve concocted a legend of my own:

It is late September 1803. A young man named Nathaniel Horsey looks up from chopping wood near the Kentucky shore of the Ohio River. He sees a group of soldiers in a big keelboat and a smaller pirogue moving downriver. Such a sight is a welcome interruption in the solitude of the sparsely settled frontier. A man near Nathaniel’s age waves from the back of the keelboat. Nathaniel raises his hand in response. He watches the boats until they disappear around the river’s bend, all the time wishing that it were he heading West to new places.

How much greater might Nathaniel’s longing be if he knew that the young man on the boat is Meriwether Lewis, an emissary of the president of the United States on his way to begin a momentous expedition to the far Northwest.