The expedition’s progress on October 28, 1805, was halted within a few miles of starting. After loading canoes at sunrise and proceeding only four or five miles down the Columbia below The Dalles, a strong westerly wind forced the party ashore on the larboard side, where they remained for the day among visiting natives. All three surviving journalists for this date — Sergeant John Ordway, Sergeant Patrick Gass, and Captain William Clark — record the same essential sequence of events, but the divergence in what each man considered worth preserving offers a useful case study in the expedition’s stratified observational culture.
The Same Trade Goods, Three Registers
The most striking convergence across the three accounts is the noting of European-manufactured items in Indian hands. Ordway’s entry is characteristically terse:
Saw a british musket copper tea kittles &C. among them
Clark, in his field notes, expands the same observation into a slightly fuller inventory:
Those Indians have a musket a Sword, and Several Brass Tea kitties which they appear to be verry fond of
And in his more polished codex entry for the day, Clark personalizes the observation by entering a house himself:
I entered one of the houses in which I Saw a British musket, a cutlass and Several brass Tea kittles of which they appeared verry fond
Gass, by contrast, omits the trade goods entirely. His account compresses the village stop to a single sentence: “halted at a small village of the natives and got some dogs from them.” The pattern is consistent with what readers of Gass’s journal come to expect — his published narrative, edited by David McKeehan, prioritizes movement, weather, hunting, and camp security over ethnographic texture. Where Clark sees evidence of a coastal trade network reaching inland, Gass sees a one-hour stop for provisions.
Clark Alone Records the Cued Hair and the Carved Canoes
Two details appear only in Clark, and they are the kind of details that mark him as the expedition’s most attentive observer of material culture on this stretch of the river. He notes an Indian wearing “a round hat jacket & wore his hair cued” — a queue, the European sailor’s hairstyle — clear evidence of contact with maritime traders on the lower Columbia. Ordway flattens this to a passing mention of a “british musket”; Gass records nothing of the sort.
Clark also devotes a full paragraph to the construction of the local canoes:
their canoes are calculated to ride the highest waves, they are built of white cedar or Pine verry light wide in the middle and tapers at each end, with aperns, and heads of animals carved on the bow
Ordway and Gass note only that Indians arrived in canoes; neither describes the vessels themselves. Clark even ventures into religious practice, reporting that “The Indians above Sacrafise the property of the Deceased to wit horses Canoes, bowls Basquets” — a claim with no parallel in the other two journals for this date and one that suggests Clark was actively interviewing or interpreting through gesture during the wind-bound hours.
What Gass and Ordway Preserve That Clark Does Not
It would be a mistake to read Clark as simply the fuller source. Ordway uniquely records that “one of the party killed a Deer and wounded another this evening a Short distance back near a pond” — a hunting detail Gass corroborates (“one of the men went out and killed a fine deer”) but which Clark omits from both his field notes and codex entry for the day. The sergeants, closer to the men and to camp routine, consistently preserve this layer of subsistence activity that the captains let slip.
Gass also frames the camp in a register the others avoid: “We were in a good safe harbour and remained there all night, accompanied by the natives.” Clark’s parallel phrasing — “encamped on the Lard Side opsd. an Rock in a verry Bad place” — directly contradicts Gass’s assessment. The disagreement is small but telling. Gass, writing for eventual publication, smooths the day into competent management; Clark, writing for himself, admits the camp was poorly chosen.
The three entries together yield a richer picture than any single one: a Chilluckittequaw village whose inhabitants possessed British trade goods and at least one man styled in European fashion, a wind that pinned the party in an exposed camp, a deer killed inland, and a steady traffic of canoes whose seaworthiness impressed only the captain who took the time to look.
