The Departure from Fort Clatsop
Clymer’s painting depicts the Corps of Discovery’s departure from Fort Clatsop in late March 1806, as the expedition began its return journey east. The composition shows the party loading and launching dugout canoes into the waters near the Pacific coast, with men carrying gear, paddles raised, and the small wooden stockade of Fort Clatsop visible behind them through the dense coastal forest. Clymer paints the scene under the overcast, damp light characteristic of Oregon’s Pacific slope in early spring, with Sitka spruce and hemlock framing the figures. The handling is loose but representational, with attention to the worn buckskin clothing, the construction of the cottonwood and pine canoes, and the muddy bank where the party assembled.
The expedition left Fort Clatsop on March 23, 1806, after a wet and dispiriting winter during which the men had subsisted largely on elk and traded with the Clatsop and Chinook peoples for fish and roots. Lewis and Clark had originally intended to remain until April but departed early because of dwindling supplies and the poor quality of the local elk. The party took five canoes up the Columbia and toward the Nez Perce country, where their horses had been left the previous autumn. Clymer’s painting captures the moment of pushing off—an episode less frequently illustrated than the arrival at the Pacific or the meeting with Sacagawea’s people.
John Ford Clymer (1907–1989) spent the early part of his career as a commercial illustrator, producing more than eighty covers for The Saturday Evening Post before turning, in the late 1960s, to easel painting devoted to western historical subjects. He produced a substantial body of work on the Lewis and Clark Expedition during the 1970s, researching costume, equipment, and topography on site in Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. The Departure from Fort Clatsop belongs to this mature phase of his career, when his Lewis and Clark canvases circulated widely through reproductions and helped shape late-twentieth-century popular imagery of the expedition. The original is held in a private collection. Clymer’s work is represented institutionally by the Clymer Museum of Art in Ellensburg, Washington, his hometown.
