Celiast Smith

Article written by Nicole Martin, PhD

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People of Fort Vancouver, c1830-1840s

NPS Photo John/Dawson & Dawson, Ltd.

The life of Celiast Smith, a Clatsop woman, embodies an often-overlooked truth about the nineteenth-century Pacific West: the important role women’s movement played in claiming and making homes. Celiast’s life spanned most of the nineteenth century. She witnessed a series of monumental transitions from an Indigenous-led Columbia River trade economy to the cosmopolitan world of the fur trade run by powerful multiracial families to the arrival of the missionaries, government officials, and settlers of American Empire.

When placed side by side, the shellfish basket from the museum collection of Lewis and Clark National Historical Park, the thimble found by archeologists at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, and the wedding plate from Celiast’s living descendants reveal the dynamism of a region in motion. They also represent snippets of the many homes Celiast built as she survived, adapted, and moved around her ancestral homeland.

This open weave basket, made by the Clatsop woman Tsin-is-tum in the 1890s from Western redcedar and Sitka spruce roots, was designed to carry shellfish gathered by women and girls from the bountiful shores of the Clatsop homeland.

NPS Photo/Lewis and Clark NHS collection (LEWI 00042)

Sustaining Community: A Shellfish Basket

Celiast was a young girl living at the mouth of the Columbia River when the Lewis and Clark Expedition arrived at the Pacific Coast.¹ The Clatsop had already been visited by Europeans who had come to trade, and the United States expedition represented another foreign power seeking to gain influence in a vast Indigenous trading system dependent on gift giving and accommodation.²

In this world of shifting powers and political uncertainty, families mattered deeply. Celiast remained close to her immediate family, especially her sisters Kilakotah and Yiamist, throughout her life. As young girls, they would have participated in activities traditionally undertaken by women, such as clam harvesting. Young girls wove baskets and used them to gather shellfish off the bountiful beaches of what is now known as the Oregon Coast.

Baskets like the one in the Lewis and Clark National Historical Park museum collection speak not only to the labor young girls and women provided in sustaining their communities but also to the artistry of weaving cedar bark, spruce root, and various grasses together into beautiful creations.³

Defying Colonialism: A Perforated Thimble

In 1821, Celiast married Basile Poirier, a French-Canadian baker working for the British Hudson’s Bay Company. By 1825, they were living at the Company’s Fort Vancouver with their firstborn. A majority of the women at Fort Vancouver were Native or Métis women married to Company employees. The families formed by these unions provided advantages for both Native and European nations, linking knowledge of the land and its resources to a global market for furs. Native women were in many ways the central players. They acted as cultural contacts and interpreters, providing Hudson’s Bay Company men strategic access to traditional trade networks, while also performing essential labor. At Fort Vancouver they grew and prepared food and turned animal skins into products that could be sold. But they were also wives and mothers who provided crucial familial stability in a time of intense change.⁴

Photo of Celiast and Solomon Smith, c. 1870

Courtesy Basch Family

Celiast, Basile, and their three children likely lived in a house in the fort’s employee Village. According to one of Celiast’s sons, Basile drank excessively and was abusive to his family.⁵ Sometime in 1833, Celiast met the American Solomon Smith, the fort’s schoolteacher, and they formed an attachment. Accounts vary about the details of what happened next – whether Celiast and Solomon ran off together or whether Chief Factor John McLoughlin sent Basile away upon learning about a wife in Montreal – but the end result was the same: Celiast’s first marriage dissolved. In escaping a frightening and dangerous situation, she was forced to leave behind her children. She moved with Solomon to the Willamette Valley where her sisters lived. The couple opened a school together and officially married in 1837.⁶

This perforated brass thimble, c. 1825-1850, found by archeologists at a former site of a home in the Fort Vancouver Village, reveals the ingenious ways women adapted fur trade related objects.

NPS Photo/Fort Vancouver NHS Collection (FOVA 15246)

The perforated thimble from Fort Vancouver National Historic Site captures the agency Celiast showed in leaving her first husband.

For many Indigenous and Métis women, the defining feature of Fort Vancouver may have been that it was not their home.

It is easy to imagine that Celiast, threatened by violence at home while taking care of young children, lived in survival mode. However, she boldly chose a new life with Solomon. We know from the historical record that other women at Fort Vancouver pushed back in small but meaningful ways, creating their own communities and culture. Some combined European dress with Indigenous preferences, while others altered objects accessed through the fur trade. Rather than using thimbles as intended, some women punched holes in them, turning them into a clothing adornment or jewelry. Many thimbles, as well as beads and other metal items, worn together would cause the wearer to make a lovely jingling sound as they walked.⁷

Homecoming: A Wedding Plate

In 1840, Celiast and Solomon returned to her homeland on the Clatsop Plains to live with and advocate for her people. Her son Silas Smith wrote of her return: “as we neared the shore at the Clatsop village...the natives came running down, and rushed into the water waist deep on either side of the canoe, and, taking her by the thwarts carried her with her load.”⁸

With this move, Celiast created a new home once again. She became a prominent member of her community, acting as a peacemaker and negotiator between the Clatsop and settlers. She briefly worked with Methodist missionaries to convert her people to Christianity and intervened on behalf of white settlers on several occasions. For the Clatsop, Celiast attached an “Indian room” to her house where displaced tribal neighbors could visit and receive the latest news about their homeland as well as traditional medicines and spiritual support. Significantly, the privacy of her home provided a space free from the influence of white settlers and thus vital to Clatsop survival. She also maintained cultural traditions of her upbringing. According to her granddaughter, she returned to speaking the Clatsop language after Solomon’s death in 1876.⁹

This plate, originally part of a dinnerware set gifted to Celiast and Solomon when they married by the Chief Factor of Fort Vancouver, John McLoughlin, has been preserved for generations by Celiast’s descendants.

Courtesy Basch Family

Celiast and Solomon’s marriage proved to be a far more stable experience than her first. McLoughlin gifted the couple a dinnerware set, of which a single plate has been preserved by some of Celiast’s descendants.¹⁰

The fact the plate has remained in the family for almost two centuries reflects the strength of the couple’s union as they navigated a series of hybrid.

At the time of Solomon’s death, the fur trading world of Celiast’s youth was long gone, replaced with a far more rigid world defined by racial stratification and separation. Marriage between whites and those with “more than one-half Indian blood” had been outlawed in Oregon Territory for a decade, and local obituaries neglected to mention Solomon’s marriage to Celiast or the six children they had together. The home and life they built was simply erased.¹¹ The wedding plate that has moved down through generations is a tangible reminder of other lived realities.

A Woman in Motion

The Clatsop basketmaker, Tsin-is-tum (Jennie Michele) laughing c. 1900 at Seaside, Oregon.

Photo courtesy of Seaside Museum & Historical Society

Celiast died in 1891. In her final decades, the Clatsop experienced unprecedented changes. In the face of devastating epidemics and sustained colonization that stripped them of their homeland, some Clatsop women found new ways to preserve their cultural traditions. Basket making in particular became an essential adaptation to the new economic order of coastal tourism. Women such as Tsin-is-tum, who wove the basket depicted above around the time of Celiast’s death, preserved women’s traditional skill by giving it new purpose and meaning.¹²

In 1900, Tsin-is-tum worked with Celiast’s son, Silas Smith, to locate the cairn where the Lewis and Clark Expedition made salt. Silas, who had learned the Clatsop language from his mother, acted as Tsin-is-tum’s interpreter.¹³ In this remarkable moment, the whole span of Celiast’s life comes into view. Tsin-is-tum’s basket, which captures the sustenance, creativity, and women’s community of Celiast’s youth, also contains the defining feature of her life. As the perforated thimble and wedding plate embody, in a place and century defined by motion and constant change, Celiast never stopped adapting.

Home and Homelands Exhibition

This project was made possible through the National Park Service in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation.

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¹ Celiast’s father, the Clatsop leader Chief Coboway, was gifted Fort Clatsop by Lewis and Clark upon the expedition’s departure as thanks for his hospitality. Biographical information regarding Celiast and her family cited in this article is primarily from David Peterson-del Mar, “Intermarriage and Agency: A Chinookan Case Study,” Ethnohistory 42, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 1-30.

² Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800-1860 (New York: Harper Collins, 2011), 109.

³ Steven Dow Beckam, The First Oregonians, ed. Laura Berg (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, Oregon Council for the Humanities, 2007) 286, 291; Mary Dodds Schlick, Columbia River Basketry: Gift of the Ancestors, Gift of the Earth” (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 20, 110, 196.

⁴ Hyde, Empires, 100-01, 112-13, 121-24 Douglas Deur, “She is Particularly Useful to Her Husband": Strategic Marriages Between Hudson's Bay Company Employees and Native Women at Fort Vancouver,” Fort Vancouver National Historical Park, National Park Service.

⁵ Peterson-del Mar, “Intermarriage and Agency,” 10.

⁶ Ibid., 8-12.

⁷ Bryn Thomas and Charles Hibbs, Jr., Report of Investigations of Excavations at Kanaka Village Vancouver Barracks Washington 1980/1981, Vol. 1 (Washington State Department of Transportation, 1984), esp. 247, 279, 292, and 299.

⁸ Peterson-del Mar, “Intermarriage and Agency,” 13. Quotation from “Mr. Silas B. Smith's Address," Oregon State Library, Salem, 7. It was originally published in the Portland Oregonian, December 18, 1899, 9.

⁹ Ibid., 13, 15, 21-22. Dick Basch, email message to Fort Vancouver National Historic Site and Lewis and Clark National Historical Park, National Park Service, December 15, 2023.

¹⁰ Dick Basch, phone conversation with Cathy Peterson, Lewis and Clark National Historical Park, February 9, 2024.

¹¹ “An Act to Prohibit Amalgamation and the Intermarriage of Races,” Oregonian, November 2, 1866.

¹² The basket was purchased by Mrs. Wm. Plimton from Tsin-in-tum in 1894 in the Seaside area in Oregon and passed down through the Plimton, then Abbott, family before being given to the Fort Clatsop National Memorial in 1963. Helen Betsy Abbott, letter to Lewis and Clark National Historical Park, National Park Service, August 10, 1987.

¹³ Douglas Deur, “The Making of Seaside's “Indian Place”: Contested and Enduring Native Spaces on the Nineteenth Century Oregon Coast,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 117, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 556, 560-61.