The moment on November 19th, 1805 when William Clark walked up the beach to present day Long Beach and carved his name and the date into a wind swept tree is captured in the life-size bronze statue Mark of Triumph. Located in Long Beach near the site of the original tree, its design was created for the City of Long Beach by artist Stanley Wanless in 1990. Photo Courtesy of The Picture Attic, Long Beach, Washington.

In five miles, the men reached “a point of high land” where the hill receded and they were able to walk on the sand beach. While on the high point, they were able to see some 30 miles to the north to present day Cape Shoalwater, the north shore of the entrance to Willapa Bay. Clark named the Cape for Captain Lewis. Interestingly, they did not see the bay itself and were unaware of its existence. In this, they were in good company; Captain Vancouver had also missed it some 13 years before. It seems they had misinterpreted an earlier description and assumed the area to be a valley drained by the Chinook River, as later shown on their finished maps.

The men walked up the beach some 4 miles. This placed them somewhere between present day Chautauqua Lodge and The Breakers Condominiums at the north end of the City of Long Beach. In 1805 – long before the construction of the contemporary north jetty at the mouth of the Columbia River - the beach was approximately one mile east of its present location. Once the jetty was added, the waters of the Columbia were moved to make a more northerly turn as they joined the Pacific Ocean. This situation has led to the accretion of a significant amount of dunal land along the western edge of the Long Beach Peninsula, in some areas as much as 2500 feet of additional land between the ‘original’ Peninsula and the current coastline. As the waters flowed northward, they deposited sands brought down by the Columbia River. Over time, these sands have formed into dunes, sprouted grasses and beach pines and, in many cases, become the site of local homes.

The advent of the automobile and drivable roads eventually spelled the demise of the train, which left Nahcotta southbound for its last run in September 1930. Pacific Highway now occupies the ground once lined with track. Extensive information and photographs of this railroad can be found in Clamshell Railroad, America’s Westernmost Line by Thomas E. Jewitt, available through the Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum (aka Ilwaco Heritage Museum) (1-360-642-3446.) The Museum also houses a 50 foot long N-gauge model of the railroad, complete with exact replicas of the surrounding buildings.

The men carved their names on pine trees and returned south to the start of the hills, noting on the way a ten-foot long sturgeon which had been thrown up on the shore. They also indicated on their maps areas of “brown water” in the surf. We know this today as the common ‘bloom’ of plankton.

In another observation of indigenous wildlife, Clark noted that "The Deer of this Coast differ materially from our Common deer in as much as they are much darker deeper bodied Shorted ledger horns equally branched from the beem the top of the tail black from the rute to the end Eyes larger and do not lope but jump.” Gass detailed that “our hunters killed 3 deer to day.”

The party followed an Indian trail from the weather beach back through the woods to Haley’s Bay and camped that night on the east bank of the Wallacut River.

Clark’s last mile is located at the northwest end of Discovery Trail as it winds along the wind-swept sands and dunes of the Long Beach Peninsula. Here is an outstanding experience for visitors of all ages and abilities to hike that last mile to the Northwest most point achieved by the Northwest Corps of Discovery. A solitary bronze tree stands in memory of Clark’s and the Corps enorumus achievement. The trail is scheduled for completion May 30, 2003.

The route later taken in the late 1800’s by the Clamshell Railroad would have mimicked the path going up the western side of the Long Beach Peninsula which the Party had taken only a short 83 years earlier. Built in 1888 by Lewis Alfred Loomis, the railroad was originally conceived as a means to transport mail the length of the Peninsula. Because the train originated at the docks in Ilwaco where it met incoming steamers from Astoria, there picking up mail and passengers, its schedule was dependent on when the tide was high enough to allow steamers to pull into the docks. This, the 13-mile long railroad quickly gained notoriety as the only railroad that ran with the tides.

In 1903, the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company purchased the railroad from Mr. Loomis for the princely sum of $142,000 and assigned a superintendent, Edward Budd, to the line. It was Budd who, after his first ride from Ilwaco to Nahcotta, named the line the “clamshell railroad.”