Lewis and Clark on the Lower Columbia

Russell’s watercolor depicts the Corps of Discovery’s encounter with Chinookan peoples along the lower Columbia River. In the foreground, a large dugout canoe carrying Native paddlers approaches from the left, its occupants raising hands in greeting or trade gesture. A second canoe holding members of the expedition—including a standing figure in a tricorn-style hat, presumably Lewis or Clark—occupies the center of the composition, with Sacagawea seated near the prow and a Black figure representing York visible among the party. The two vessels meet on broad, gray-green water beneath an overcast Pacific Northwest sky, with the timbered Columbia shoreline rendered in muted greens and browns behind them. Russell works in transparent washes, building atmosphere through layered grays and keeping figural detail loose but legible.

The scene corresponds to the expedition’s progress down the Columbia in late October and November 1805, when the captains repeatedly described meetings with Chinook, Clatsop, and Wahkiakum people who came alongside in cedar canoes to trade fish, roots, and wapato. Russell painted this watercolor in 1905, the year of the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland, Oregon, a celebration that generated commissions and renewed public interest in expedition imagery. He was then in his mid-forties and at the height of his commercial success, producing illustrations for magazines and books alongside his easel work.

Russell, born in St. Louis in 1864, had moved to Montana as a teenager and built his reputation on firsthand familiarity with the northern plains, its wildlife, and its Indigenous peoples. He returned to Lewis and Clark subjects throughout his career, producing the well-known oils Lewis and Clark Meeting the Flathead Indians (1912, for the Montana State Capitol) and Lewis and Clark on the Lower Columbia in oil (1905), of which this watercolor appears to be a related study or independent treatment in the lighter medium. The work is held by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, whose collection of Russell paintings and watercolors—assembled by Amon G. Carter Sr. beginning in the 1930s—is among the most extensive in any public institution and a central resource for scholarship on Russell’s depictions of the expedition.