The events of April 12, 1806, near the Cascades of the Columbia are recorded by four members of the expedition: Captains Lewis and Clark, Sergeant Patrick Gass, and Sergeant John Ordway. Each narrator covers the same core sequence — the failed attempt to haul a pirogue up through a violent rapid, the loss of that craft, the laborious portage of all baggage, and the relatively peaceable visit of the Y-eh-huhs (or Wy-ach-hich) — yet the entries diverge sharply in detail, register, and interpretive weight. Read together, they offer a useful case study in how the expedition’s documentary record was layered.
The Lost Pirogue: Parallel Phrasing, Captain to Captain
The closest textual relationship of the day is between Lewis and Clark, whose accounts of the pirogue’s loss share not only structure but near-identical phrasing. Lewis writes that
the bow unfortunately took the current at too great a distance from the rock, she turned her side to the stream and the utmost exertions of all the party were unable to resist the forse with which she was driven by the current.
Clark records the same moment:
the bow unfortunately took the Current at too great a distance from the rock, She turned broad Side to the Stream, and the exertions of every man was not Sufficient to hold her.
Both captains predict, in nearly matching language, that the loss “will I fear Compell us to purchase” another canoe “at an extravigent price.” The parallelism confirms what scholars have long noted about this stretch of the journals: the captains conferred and, at times, copied from one another, producing a doubled but not fully independent record.
Gass and Ordway, by contrast, write as eyewitnesses on the rope. Ordway’s account is the most kinetic: the canoe “took a Swing on us and broke away and rid the high waves down the rapids.” Gass renders the same moment with sergeant’s economy — the current “pulled the rope out of the men’s hands and went down the river” — and follows it immediately with the labor that mattered most to the enlisted men: “a very fatiguing business.” Where the captains worry about replacement cost, the sergeants register the bodies straining on the line.
What Each Narrator Notices
The portage itself draws different attention from each writer. Ordway alone specifies the logistics — the men “carried it all up at 4 loads a peace” over a mile-and-a-half portage — and he alone preserves a striking ethnographic aside that the captains omit:
one of the Squaws told us in the Clatsop tongue that She had Slept with the white tradors &C.
This detail, recording Native testimony of prior contact with maritime traders, appears in no other journal for the day. Gass, meanwhile, is the only narrator to describe the surrounding landscape’s weather signature, noting that on “the very high mountains on the south side of the river, snow fell and continued on the trees and rocks during the whole of the day.” Clark echoes this only briefly at the close of his entry; Lewis omits it entirely.
Lewis devotes the most space to the abandoned village halfway across the portage, supplying measurements — “the fraim of the houses, which are remarkably large one 160 by 45 feet, remain almost entire” — and an architectural observation that the houses “consist of a double set as if oune house had been built within the other.” Clark mentions the same village but defers the architectural detail to Lewis, recording instead the chief’s testimony that it had been “the residence of his Tribe dureing the last Salmon Season.” The captains here divide labor: Lewis takes the structure, Clark takes the oral history, and each takes a vocabulary.
Register and the Question of the Natives
The day’s underlying tension — the captains’ wariness of theft and confrontation — surfaces differently in each account. Clark states the precaution plainly: men with “Short guns” were ordered to carry them on the portage “for fear of Some attempt on the part of the nativs to rob the party.” Lewis frames the same order but adds a self-congratulatory gloss: the natives “behaved themselves much better; no doubt the precautions which they observed us take had a good effect.” Gass and Ordway, closer to the rank and file, simply note that the natives “left us at night” or “visited us” — the armed-guard order goes unrecorded in their pages.
The Y-eh-huhs (Lewis’s spelling) or Wy-ach-hich (Clark’s) receive warm notice from both captains, who agree that this upriver group “contemned the conduct of their relations towards us.” Clark adds the commercial detail of purchasing a sheepskin robe for “one Elk and one deer Skin,” and reports the seller’s father describing “great numbers of those animals” in flocks on the steep rocks above — a piece of natural-history intelligence that Lewis confirms but attributes more generally.
Across the four entries, a hierarchy of concerns emerges: the captains write for posterity and for Jefferson, attending to vocabulary, architecture, and zoology; the sergeants write for the record of the day’s work, attending to ropes, loads, and weather. Only by reading them together does April 12, 1806 come fully into view.
