The October 6, 1805 entries from William Clark and Sergeant John Ordway capture a transitional moment for the Corps of Discovery: the abandonment of Canoe Camp on the Clearwater River and the resumption of water travel after weeks of overland struggle through the Bitterroots. Yet the two narrators frame the day so differently that, read side by side, they appear almost to describe separate journeys. Clark’s entry concentrates almost entirely on preparations and conditions at the launch site, while Ordway’s begins where Clark’s effectively ends — with the canoes already in motion downstream.
Two Clocks, Two Itineraries
Clark’s entry is dominated by the morning’s logistics. He records that the party gathered and concealed their tack and a portion of their munitions before departure:
had all our Saddles Collected a whole dug and in the night buried them, also a Canister of powder and a bag of Balls at the place the Canoe which Shields made was cut from the body of the tree
This cache — saddles buried roughly half a mile below camp on the inside of a river bend — represents the Corps’ commitment to the river route and their assumption that horses would be reclaimed only on the return journey. Clark also notes that “all the Canoes finished this evening ready to be put into the water,” placing the actual launch late in the day: “Set out at 3 oClock P M & proceeded on.”
Ordway, by contrast, opens mid-motion — “we set out as usal and proceeded on” — and devotes his entry to the downstream passage. He logs a small Nez Perce village on the larboard side, a canoe of Indians coming out to trade fish and roots, two evacuated villages, cottonwood bottoms, and a rising westerly wind. He closes with a precise tally: “we Came 29 miles this day and Camped on the Stard Side close under a clift of rocks.” Where Clark inventories what was left behind, Ordway inventories what was passed.
Captain’s Body, Sergeant’s Mileage
The register difference is striking. Clark, as co-commander, records the day’s strategic decisions — caching, completion of the canoe fleet, the leaky third-rapid passage in his own boat — and grants himself a line of personal complaint absent from Ordway’s account:
I am taken verry unwell with a paine in the bowels & Stomach, which is certainly the effects of my diet—which last all night—.
The gastric distress, which Clark attributes to the unfamiliar Nez Perce diet of dried salmon and camas roots, had been afflicting much of the party since their descent from the Lolo Trail. Ordway, who must have been suffering similarly, makes no mention of it. His sergeant’s journal keeps to the externals — distance, wind, trade, terrain — in a manner consistent with the daily logbook function the enlisted journals frequently served.
Clark also offers a meteorological observation that Ordway omits entirely, drawing a comparison across thousands of miles of expedition memory:
The winds blow cold from a little before day untill the Suns gets to Some hight from the Mountans East as they did from the mountans at the time we lay at the falls of Missouri from the West
This kind of long-range pattern recognition — linking Clearwater dawn winds to those at the Great Falls of the Missouri the previous summer — is characteristic of Clark’s geographic mind and absent from the sergeants’ more immediate prose.
Complementary Silences
Read together, the two entries demonstrate how the multi-journal record of the expedition compensates for individual gaps. Clark’s failure to log mileage or describe the villages encountered downstream is filled by Ordway’s “29 miles” and his note of fish-and-root trading. Conversely, Ordway never mentions the buried saddles, the powder cache, Clark’s illness, or the leak Clark’s canoe sprang at the third rapid. Neither narrator alone provides a complete picture of October 6; only the two in combination reconstruct the day’s full arc, from the predawn burial of saddles to the evening camp beneath the cliff.
The contrast also reflects the captains’ editorial habits at this stage of the journey. Lewis, notably, is silent on this date — his journal hiatus across the Clearwater descent leaves Clark as the sole officer-narrator, and Ordway’s parallel record assumes added evidentiary weight as the only enlisted account of the day’s river miles.
