About The Search for Chequoss: A Camp from the 1853 Pacific Railroad Survey Expedition
On July 18, 1853, a party of 68 men and 173 horses and mules set out from Fort Vancouver under the command of Army Brevet Captain George B. McClellan. Their job was to explore the mountain passes of what is now Washington state and find a route suitable for a transcontinental railroad. Their survey was ordered by the Secretary of War, and the expedition included soldiers, engineers, and various "scientific men," including George Gibbs as ethnographer. Using Native American guides, they followed a well-established Indigenous trail across the Cascade Mountains, which Gibbs called the Klickitat Trail. They moved at a slow pace, taking 22 days to reach the crest of the Cascade Range, where they rested for three days at a camp the local Klickitat Indians called Chequoss. This talk describes the efforts to relocate Chequoss, using a combination of archival records, oral history, and archaeology.
Cheryl Mack is an archaeologist and historian living in Trout Lake, Washington. She received her master's degree in Anthropology from the University of Oregon and began working as an archaeologist in the Columbia River Gorge in 1979, assisting with salvage excavations at the site of Clah-Cleh-Lah, located near the second powerhouse at the Bonneville Dam. Most of her career was spent working as an archaeologist for the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in southwest Washington, from which she retired in 2011 after 31 years.
