The journal entries dated October 5, 1805 present a revealing case study in how three expedition narrators handled overlapping events at Canoe Camp on the Clearwater River. While William Clark and Patrick Gass both anchor their accounts in the day’s principal task — branding the expedition’s horses and entrusting them to Nez Perce caretakers — John Ordway’s entry as transcribed here belongs to a later date downriver, illustrating how editorial compilations can fold neighboring days into a single dated record.
The Horse Transfer: Clark’s Precision and Gass’s Compression
Clark provides the most detailed account of the branding, recording the exact tally and the ceremonial gestures that accompanied the handoff. He notes that the men:
Collected all our horses, & Branded them 38 in No. and delivered them to the men who were to take Charge of them, each of which I gave a Knife & one a wampom Shell gorget
In his second, expanded entry for the same day, Clark adds a practical detail absent from the first version — that the captains “Cut off their fore top” — and identifies the caretakers more specifically as “the 2 brothers and one Son of one of the Chiefs.” This pattern of Clark revisiting and amplifying his own field notes is characteristic of his journal-keeping practice, where a terser daily entry is often followed by a fuller version incorporating diplomatic and ethnographic detail.
Gass, by contrast, compresses October 5, 6, and 7 into a single narrative paragraph. He records the branding, the burial of saddles and ammunition on the sixth, and the launch of the canoes on the seventh as a continuous sequence:
canoe making, we collected all our horses and branded them, in order to leave them with the Indians, the old chief having promised that they should be well taken care of.
Where Clark itemizes the gifts and counts the animals, Gass abstracts: “the old chief” stands in for Clark’s named relations, and the rationale (“in order to leave them with the Indians”) replaces the diplomatic transaction. This compression is consistent with Gass’s published 1807 narrative, which routinely smooths daily detail into readable prose for a general audience.
A Shared Misery — and a Telling Omission
One of the most human details of the day appears only in Clark. Both versions of his entry record the captains’ unfortunate experiment with a root-only supper:
Capt Lewis & my Self eate a Supper of roots boiled, which filled us So full of wind, that we were Scercely able to Breathe all night felt the effects of it.
The expanded version softens the earthier phrasing — “Swelled us in Such a manner that we were Scercely able to breath for Several hours” — and adds the clinical aside that “Capt Lewis not So well to day as yesterday.” Gass, writing for publication, omits the episode entirely. The contrast underscores a register difference visible across the journals: Clark’s field entries preserve bodily candor that Gass’s polished narrative tends to suppress.
Clark also alone notes the failure of the hunt — “our hunters with every diligence Could kill nothing” — and explains it environmentally: “The hills high and ruged and woods too dry to hunt the deer.” Gass mentions the terrain only after the canoes are launched, and in more generic terms: “The hills come close on the river on both sides; where there are a few pine trees.”
Ordway’s Misaligned Entry
The Ordway passage transcribed under this date plainly describes events from later in the voyage — passing “a verry large village, at the foot of an Island on the Stard Side,” trading with people who “wanted to trade with us for muskets,” and camping after thirty-one miles. The editorial footnotes reference Bachelor’s Island near the mouth of the Lewis River and Mount St. Helens, locations the expedition reached in early November. The misalignment is a useful reminder that printed editions of Ordway sometimes carry pagination and dating artifacts from their nineteenth- and early twentieth-century editors. For October 5 proper, Clark and Gass remain the reliable witnesses, with Clark supplying the granular ethnographic and physiological detail and Gass providing the compressed retrospective frame.
