The entries of John Ordway, Patrick Gass, and William Clark for October 1, 1805 capture a single day at Canoe Camp on the Clearwater River, where the Corps of Discovery was hollowing out cottonwood logs for the descent toward the Columbia. Read together, the three accounts reveal how differently each man weighed the same set of facts: the slow progress of canoe-building, the failure of the hunters, the dependence on Nez Perce provisions, and the lingering sickness that had laid low much of the party after their crossing of the Bitterroots.
Three Registers, One Camp
Ordway’s entry is the briefest and most procedural. He notes only that the men "tinued on makeing our canoes as usal" and that they "built fires on Some of them to burn them out," adding with quiet satisfaction that they "found them to burn verry well." His closing line — "our hunters killed nothing this day" — is offered without comment. Ordway, as sergeant, tends to log labor and outcomes; the emotional texture of the camp is largely absent.
Gass, also a sergeant, writes in a more reflective and explanatory mode. Where Ordway simply records the burning of the canoes, Gass frames the technique as a borrowing:
All the men are now able to work; but the greater number are very weak. To save them from hard labour, we have adopted the Indian method of burning out the canoes.
Gass is the only one of the three on this date to credit the Nez Perce explicitly for the method, and the only one to weigh labor against the men’s weakened condition. His entry also runs forward across several days, a habit of compression that distinguishes his published journal from the daily entries of Ordway and Clark.
Clark’s Candor About Hunger and Illness
Clark provides by far the fullest picture, and he supplies details the sergeants omit. Both of his versions of the entry — the field note and the fuller fair copy — record that Lewis was "getting much better than for Several days past," a piece of information neither Ordway nor Gass mentions. Clark also tracks the diplomatic traffic of the day, noting that "Several Indians visit us from the different villages below and on the main fork S."
Most striking is Clark’s frankness about the diet. Where Gass refers neutrally to "Indian provisions" and Ordway says nothing about food at all, Clark writes:
nothin to eate except a little dried fish which they men complain of as working of them as as much as a dost of Salts.
The simile — dried salmon acting as a purgative comparable to a dose of salts — is the kind of bodily detail Clark records freely and his fellow journalists almost always suppress. It also helps explain Gass’s later note, dated October 2, that the party "killed one of our horses" precisely because they feared "the Indian provisions should not agree with us." The dysentery Clark describes is the unstated cause behind the decision Gass records.
Clark alone also notes the trade preparations: he "laid out a Small assortment of Such articles as those Indians were fond of to trade with them for Some provisions," observing parenthetically that "they are remarkably fond of Beeds." This ethnographic aside is characteristic of Clark’s fair-copy revisions, which often expand on the bare field entry with details aimed at a future reader.
Patterns of Omission and Emphasis
Cross-reading the three entries shows a consistent division of labor among the journalists. Ordway documents work performed. Gass explains methods and rationales, often with a backward glance at Indigenous instruction. Clark registers leadership concerns — Lewis’s health, diplomatic visits, trade goods — and is unusually willing to record the physical suffering of the men. None of the three borrows phrasing from the others on this date; the verbal independence suggests each was writing from his own observation rather than copying a shared draft, even though all three were encamped within yards of one another.
The convergence of their silences is also telling. None mentions Sacagawea, Charbonneau, or York; none names a specific Nez Perce visitor; none describes the canoes’ dimensions. What unites the entries is the quiet anxiety of a party stalled by illness and dependent on the goodwill of their hosts — an anxiety Clark alone allows himself to voice plainly.
