The entries of April 10, 1806, find the Corps of Discovery laboring up the rapids below the Upper Cascades of the Columbia, towing canoes by line, trading with the Clah-clah’lah villagers, and confronting the persistent hazard of swift water. The four surviving accounts — by Lewis, Clark, Ordway, and Gass — converge on the same sequence of events but diverge sharply in what each narrator chooses to emphasize.
The Bighorn Skin: A Captains’ Preoccupation
The most striking divergence concerns a mountain sheep skin acquired at a Clah-clah’lah village on the north bank. Lewis and Clark devote nearly identical paragraphs to the specimen, recording its horns, wool, and the natives’ account of the herds. Lewis writes:
the natives offered us a sheepskin for sail, than which nothing could have been more acceptable except the animal itself. the skin of the head of the sheep with the horns remaining was cased in such manner as to fit the head of a man by whom it was woarn and highly prized as an ornament. we obtained this cap in exchange for a knife, and were compelled to give two Elkskins in exchange for the skin.
Clark’s version is so close in phrasing — "nothing could be more acceptable except the Animal itself" — that the parallel suggests one captain consulted the other’s notes, a pattern well documented across their 1806 entries. Both record the horns as "abought 4 inches long, Celindric, Smooth, black" and both relay the informants’ claim that a herd of 36 had been sighted nearby.
Ordway, by contrast, compresses the entire transaction into a single sentence: "Cap.t Lewis purchased a white mountain Sheep Skin for which he gave 2 Elk hides." Gass is briefer still, noting only that "I saw the skin of a wild sheep, which had fine beautiful wool on it." Neither sergeant grasped — or cared to record — that the captains were acquiring a scientific specimen of what would later be identified as the bighorn (Ovis canadensis). The register difference is instructive: Lewis and Clark write as naturalists; Ordway and Gass write as working soldiers logging the day’s barter.
The Runaway Canoe
All four narrators record the loss and recovery of a small canoe whose tow-line broke on the rapids, but the details vary in revealing ways. Gass offers the plainest summary:
the tow-line of the small canoe, which the hunters had on ahead, broke; but fortunately there was nothing in her, as the three hunters were on shore dragging her up, and had taken out all the loading. As she passed by us Capt. Lewis got some of the natives to bring her to shore.
Ordway names the men — "Drewyer & the 2 Fields" — and adds the diplomatic coda that "our officers gave them two knives for the kindness" of the natives who retrieved the craft. Lewis’s entry, cut off in the surviving manuscript, mentions only that "the small canoe got loose from the hunters and went a drift with a tin vessel and tommahawk in her." Clark omits the incident from the portion preserved here altogether. Ordway emerges as the fullest reporter on this point — a reminder that the sergeant’s journal sometimes captures personnel and exchange details the captains pass over.
What Only Ordway Saw
Ordway alone records an extended ethnographic observation appended to the day’s labors — a description of a graveyard he encountered below an ancient village:
this is a different manner from any I have Seen of hurrying the dead in tombs about 8 feet Square made of wood plank and tite flowers [floors] made of plank layn in them and the corps are layn out on the flower Roped up in Some kind of a Robe, and all thier property is deposited with them Such as copper tea kittles baskets cockle Shells canoes are layn by the Side of sd tombs also.
Neither captain mentions the burial structures, though such plank tombs were a documented feature of the lower Columbia mortuary practice. Ordway also records a minor theft — "one of the Indians Stole an exe" — recovered when a fellow tribesman intervened. These are precisely the sorts of details that the captains, focused on natural history and navigation, routinely delegated to their sergeants’ notebooks.
Taken together, the four accounts illustrate the layered documentary record the expedition produced: Lewis and Clark in close textual conversation over scientific specimens, Ordway supplying ethnographic and personnel detail, and Gass distilling the day into the laconic summary of a working journal. The convergences confirm shared events; the divergences preserve what each man thought worth keeping.
