View of the Columbia river, looking towards Mount St Helens, miles before reaching Astoria.
Fort Stevens has mostly remains from a WWII era fortification which was aimed at defending the coast against invaders (in 1942 they even got bombed by a Japanese submarine).
An earlier fort was built there in the 1860s near a Clatsop Indian village (a Chinook tribe), but nothing remains. It was meant to protect the area that could have been disrupted easily with just one boat prior to the fort's construction. The fort was not so interesting to me as it was just another set of bunkers like we have in Normandy... However I really liked the rebuilt Clatsop longhouse. I was expecting Indians to live in tepees but apparently the Northwest Indians lived in nice wooden houses. This kind of breaks yet another Hollywood induced myth.
Later on we visited fort Clatsop, which was the first settlement in Oregon by Lewis and Clark. The Lewis and Clark Expedition (1803–1806), was the first American overland expedition to the Pacific coast and back. The building is a modern rebuilt but it was still very interesting.
Lewis and Clark's room
And more pictures in this gallery.
