The expedition’s descent of the lower Snake River culminated on October 16, 1805, with arrival at the great confluence near present-day Pasco, Washington. Two sergeants — Patrick Gass and John Ordway — left journal entries for the day, and a comparison of their accounts reveals both the close coordination of the expedition’s enlisted journal-keepers and the distinct sensibilities each man brought to the page.
Parallel Accounts of a Difficult Descent
Both sergeants devote the first portion of their entries to the morning’s navigational troubles. The structural similarity is striking: a canoe grounds on rocks in a rapid, a second canoe is unloaded and sent to assist, the party reunites on shore, and then proceeds. Gass writes that the party
proceeded on about 3 miles, when one of our canoes run upon some rocks in a rapid, but by unloading another canoe and sending it to her assistance, we got all safe to land, and then continued our voyage.
Ordway’s version is nearly identical in sequence:
over the rockey rapids one of the canoes run fast on a rock in a bad rapid and Stayed untill we went with a canoe to their assist-ance, got all Safe to land loaded and set out again and proceeded on.
The verbal echoes — “run upon some rocks” / “run fast on a rock,” “all safe to land,” “proceeded on” — suggest the two sergeants were either drawing on shared verbal formulas common to expedition journal practice or comparing notes at day’s end. Both then describe a second, more serious rapid where the party portaged baggage about a mile by land before lining the canoes through. Gass specifies they took “the canoes over the rapids, two at a time,” a logistical detail Ordway omits. Ordway, in turn, adds context Gass leaves out: this was “the last bad rapid as the Indians Sign to us” — preserving the fact that the Nez Perce or local guides had communicated the river’s character to the party in advance.
The Confluence and the Country
The two narrators diverge most sharply when describing the confluence itself. Gass is laconic. He records simply that the party
arrived at the great Columbia river, which comes in from the north-west. We found here a number of natives, of whose nations we have not yet found out the names. We encamped on the point between the two rivers. The country all round is level, rich and beautiful, but without timber.
Ordway, by contrast, lingers. He notes that the river they have just descended — the Snake — is in fact “wider than the Columbia River,” a hydrographic observation Gass does not make. He estimates the Native gathering at “about 200 Savages” camped on the point, where Gass offers only “a number.” Ordway also records the commercial transactions of the evening: “they Sold us eight fat dogs and Some fresh sammon.” Most significantly, Ordway describes the formal evening reception:
in the evening the whole band came Singing in their way to our Camp around our fires and Smoaked with us, and appeared verry friendly, they have pleanty of beeds Copper & brass trinkets, about them which they Sign to us that they got them from Some tradors on a River to the North of this place.
This is an ethnographically rich passage that Gass entirely omits. Ordway notices the trade goods — beads, copper, brass — and registers the geographic intelligence the Native peoples conveyed by sign: that white traders were operating on a river to the north, almost certainly a reference to the maritime fur trade reaching inland from the lower Columbia or to the Fraser system Mackenzie had reached in 1793.
Register and Editorial Layering
The two entries also differ in register because they reach the modern reader in different states. Ordway’s text preserves field-journal orthography — “rockey,” “sammon,” “verry,” “tradors” — while Gass’s published 1807 journal has been smoothed by his editor David McKeehan into standardized prose. The Mackenzie footnote appended to Gass’s entry, with its reference to salmon ascending western rivers in shoals “so abundant, that the natives have a constant and plentiful supply,” is plainly McKeehan’s editorial intrusion rather than Gass’s field observation. Reading Gass and Ordway together thus offers not only two perspectives on October 16 but also a useful reminder that Gass’s published prose is a layered document, while Ordway’s manuscript preserves the rougher texture of the day itself.
