A “Lussious” Fish

n February 25, 1806, Meriwether Lewis recorded that the Clatsop Indian chief, Coboway, came to the fort to sell some hats, some sturgeon, and "a [species of small fish which now begin to run, and are taken in great quantities...by means of skiming or scooping nets."

"On this page," he wrote, "I have drawn the likeness of them as large as life." The specimen was evidently 8-1/8 inches long, average for eulachons, which seldom exceed 10 inches.

The following day Clark copied Lewis's description into his journal, and made his own drawing of the eulachon, virtually identical with Lewis's. Perhaps he actually made both drawings.

Lewis had modestly protested that "it [is] as perfect as I can make it with my pen and will serve to give a general idea of the fish."

Perfect enough, for an amateur! If you study Lewis's drawing as intently and affectionately as he studied the eulachon, you'll learn more about the man than the fish. He places each stroke with an unerring sense of weight, shading, spacing, boundary, and proportion. There is scarcely a blemish... nary a blotch. Observe the three-dimensional quality of the body, the details of the gill, and the textures in the tailfins. Patience, patience!

Lewis's words painted the colors that eluded their pens.

…the back is of a bluish duskey colour and that of the lower part of the sides and belley is of a silvery white. …the first bone of the gills next behind the eye is of a bluish cast, and the second of a light goald colour nearly white.

Of course, they tasted it, too.

I find them best when cooked in Indian stile," wrote Lewis,

which is by roasting a number of them together on a wooden spit without any previous preperation whatever. They are so fat they require no additional sauce, and I think them superior to any fish I ever tasted, even more delicate and lussious than the white fish of the [Great?] lakes which have heretofore formed my standart of excellence among the fishes.

"The natives," Lewis sniffed, "do not appear to be very scrupelous about eating them when a little feated." He meant fetid--rotten smelling.

--Joseph Mussulman