This year, as Astoria celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Astoria Column, thousands of visitors will make the climb to the top of Coxcomb Hill.
They will circle the spiral monument that has overlooked the Columbia River since 1926. They will photograph the sweeping views of forest, river and ocean. They will trace the scenes painted around the column’s exterior and reflect on a century of history. Just beyond the monument, however, stands another landmark.
A weathered memorial canoe rests on the hillside overlooking the Columbia River. It honors Chief Comcomly (in the Chinuk Wawa language it is spelled: Qamqamli), one of the most influential Chinook leaders of the early 19th century. For the Chinook Indian Nation, the memorial represents even more than a historical figure.
It tells a story of leadership, loss and survival. It preserves the memory of a man whose grave was robbed, whose remains were taken across the ocean and whose descendants still live throughout the lower Columbia region today.
“Like so many folks, we love going up on Coxcomb Hill and bringing people when they come to visit,” said Chinook Indian Nation Chairman Tony Johnson. “But for us, the primary stop there is always that memorial for Comcomly.”
Johnson’s connection to the memorial is personal.
“We are relatives of Comcomly and proud of that,” he said.
Johnson is a descendant of the same family line. Other descendants continue to serve within the Chinook Indian Nation, including members of the Tribal Council. To Johnson, the memorial is not simply about remembering a famous chief. It is about honoring an ancestor.
A leader at the mouth of the Columbia
Long before Astoria was founded, Chinook villages lined the shores of the Columbia estuary. The river served as a transportation route, a fishing ground and a center of trade that connected Indigenous communities throughout the Pacific Northwest. Comcomly emerged from one of the most prominent family lines in the region.
“It is a very important chief’s line from the north shore of the mouth of the Columbia River,” Johnson said. “That family line has always been noted as honorable folks with important status.”
The location of the villages associated with Comcomly’s family helped shape that status.
As ships entered the Columbia River during the fur trade era, many anchored near Chinook communities positioned along the river’s mouth. Those encounters placed leaders like Comcomly at the center of a rapidly changing world.
“The way the early ships came into the river and where they could actually anchor really added to the status of that community,” Johnson said.
By the early 1800s, Comcomly had become one of the best-known Indigenous leaders on the Pacific Coast, interacting with explorers, traders and settlers arriving in the region.
Today, nearly two centuries after his death, his name remains familiar throughout lower Columbia. But for many Chinook families, the most enduring part of his story came after he died.
A grave disturbed
Comcomly was originally buried on the hillside overlooking the Columbia River. His burial reflected a tradition practiced by Chinook people for generations.
Then, in 1835, his grave was robbed. His skull was removed and shipped to a museum in Portsmouth, England. For Chinook descendants, the theft represented far more than the removal of a historical artifact.
In Chinook teachings, disturbing a person’s remains carries profound spiritual consequences. “Lots of feelings about that, of course,” Johnson said. “One of the worst things that you can do to a person’s body in our teaching is to separate their bones. It’s quite frustrating that that’s what happened.”
The theft remains one of the most painful chapters associated with Comcomly’s legacy. While portions of his remains eventually returned to the Pacific Northwest, Johnson said the damage caused by separating those remains can never fully be undone.
The story also reflects a broader history experienced by Indigenous communities throughout North America, where graves were disturbed and human remains collected by museums, universities and private institutions. For decades, Comcomly’s skull remained thousands of miles from the place where he had been laid to rest.
Bringing him home
The effort to return Comcomly’s remains began in the 1950s. According to Chelsea Vaughn, curator of the Clatsop County Historical Society, local historian Burnby Bell spearheaded the campaign to bring the remains back from England.
Bell reportedly viewed the effort as a form of restitution for what had been done to Comcomly. The return of the remains marked an important step, but it did not resolve every issue. Vaughn said early efforts involved cooperation between local historians and Chinook descendants. However, the decision to retain and display Comcomly’s skull after its return generated opposition from members of the Chinook Indian Nation.
“The taking and display of human remains is — and was always — wrong,” Vaughn said. “It is part of our history, and we own it.”
The remains were ultimately reburied in 1973. Vaughn said the historical society’s actions should be understood within the broader context of museum practices at the time, while also acknowledging the harm those practices caused.
“Many museums, much more prominent than us, continue to hold human remains and are actually fighting their repatriation,” she said.
Even so, Vaughn noted that the return and reburial of Comcomly’s remains occurred relatively early in the larger movement to repatriate Indigenous ancestors from museum collections. Today, Comcomly’s skull rests in a cemetery in Ilwaco, Washington. But the memorial overlooking Astoria remains one of the most visible reminders of that history.
Building a memorial
The idea for the memorial emerged through the efforts of Bell and other members of the Clatsop County Historical Society. Bell enlisted local illustrator Rolf Klep and shipbuilder Joe Dyer to help transform the concept into reality.
According to Vaughn, Klep based his sketches on an 1841 illustration created during the Charles Wilkes Expedition. Dyer’s son, Thomas, later developed working plans using a model canoe carved by Clatsop Chief Tostum.
Workers at the Astoria Marine Construction Company used those plans to construct the memorial. At its dedication in 1961, held during a visit by Lord Astor of England, the canoe itself was not yet complete. Portions of the structure remained wire mesh and rebar stretched over the framework.
The memorial was finished later. For Johnson, one detail remains especially important: Comcomly’s direct descendants participated in its creation.
“That’s really fitting,” he said.
The memorial may not perfectly replicate a traditional Chinook canoe, Johnson added, but it remains one of the most recognizable public tributes to Chinook history in the region.
Remembering a tradition
The memorial depicts an elevated canoe burial, a practice once common throughout Chinook territory. “If you were to have seen a large-scale Chinook cemetery in the past, it was full of these raised canoes,” Johnson said.
Some would have been elevated in trees. Others rested on scaffolds built specifically for burials. Along portions of the Columbia estuary, islands served as important burial grounds where these structures stood above the landscape.
The memorial also includes representations of spiritually significant boards associated with Comcomly’s life. Johnson described them as an important part of Chinook religious traditions but declined to discuss their deeper meaning.
“This is referring to our religion,” he said. “That religion is very private.” For Johnson, that privacy reflects respect rather than secrecy. Some traditions are meant to remain within the community. Still, he believes the memorial offers visitors an opportunity to better understand a cultural practice that once stretched throughout lower Columbia.
“I am pleased that that is what is represented there,” he said. The memorial, he added, reflects a tradition that many people have never seen and may not know existed.
More than one man
Standing beside the Astoria Column, the Comcomly memorial appears modest compared with the towering monument nearby. Yet Johnson believes its significance reaches far beyond the story of a single leader.
The canoe memorial honors Comcomly, but it also represents generations of Chinook people whose burial sites once lined the Columbia River and Pacific Coast.
“I do think in the big picture it represents the thousands, or tens of thousands, or, I’m sure over time, hundreds of thousands of similar graves that existed throughout our aboriginal territory,” Johnson said.
He hopes future generations will gain a deeper understanding of those traditions and the communities that practiced them. “I dream of a time where we would be able to see something that approximates what our old cemeteries looked like,” he said. “Not only for our community, but for the folks who live and are making their lives here today.”
As Astoria marks the centennial of its most famous landmark, the memorial nearby offers a reminder that the region’s history did not begin with the city, the column or the arrival of settlers. It stretches back through generations of Chinook families who lived along the river long before Astoria existed.
“That memorial is very important for reflecting a tradition that had a very long history here,” Johnson said, “and is not well understood or very often seen.”
