The arrival at what would become Canoe Camp marks a pivotal logistical moment in the expedition’s westward journey: the transition from overland travel to river descent. The journals of John Ordway, Patrick Gass, and William Clark for September 26, 1805, converge on the same location at the junction of the North and South forks of the Kooskooskee (Clearwater) River, but each narrator foregrounds a different dimension of the day’s activities.
Three Registers of the Same Arrival
Clark, writing as both commander and physician, produces the most compressed and instrumental account. His field entry telegraphs the day’s essentials:
Set out early and proceeded down the river to the bottom on the S Side opposit the forks & formed a Camp had ax handled ground &c. our axes all too Small, Indians caught Sammon & Sold us, 2 Chiefs & thir families came & camped near us, Several men bad, Capt Lewis Sick I gave Pukes Salts &c. to Several, I am a little unwell. hot day
Clark’s expanded version of the same entry elaborates on the medical interventions — “Salts Pils Galip, Tarter emetic &c.” — and clarifies the canoe-building plan: men “apotned” (apportioned) and “ready to commence building canoes on tomorrow.” The repeated complaint that the axes are “Small & badly Calculated to build Canoes of the large Pine” reveals a commander already calculating how a tool deficiency will slow the next phase of the expedition.
Ordway, by contrast, narrates the day as a sergeant attentive to movement and camp construction. He alone records the practical detail that the party “made a pen round the officers lodge to put the baggage in,” a security measure missing from both Clark and Gass. Ordway also notes the river crossing “at a shole place the water to the horses belleys” and the “narrow plain thinly covd with pitch pine timber” — the very pine that Clark’s small axes would struggle to fell.
Diagnosing the Sickness
All three narrators register the sweep of illness through the party, but their explanations differ. Ordway offers a causal hypothesis grounded in environmental reasoning:
Several of the party Sick with a relax by a Sudden change of diet and water as well as the change of climate also.
Clark, the acting physician, reports symptoms and treatments without theorizing about cause — Lewis is “Sick,” several men are “bad,” and Clark himself is “a little unwell.” The editorial footnote within Ordway’s text preserves Gass’s blunter assessment: “Captain Clarke gave all the sick a dose of Rush’s Pills to see what effect that would have.” That phrasing — labeled “naively” by the editor — captures Gass’s characteristic plainspoken skepticism, treating the celebrated Rush’s Thunderclappers as an experiment rather than a proven remedy. The contrast with Clark’s clinical inventory of “Salts Pils Galip, Tarter emetic” is striking: the commander lists pharmacopoeia; the sergeant questions efficacy.
Gass’s Ethnographic Detour
Gass’s published entry for the date diverges most sharply from Ordway and Clark. Where they describe arrival at the forks and the establishment of camp, Gass instead describes a continuing journey through Nez Perce villages and devotes his attention to the preparation of camas bread:
Their bread is made of roots which they call comas, and which resemble onions in shape, but are of a sweet taste. This bread is manufactured by steaming, pounding and baking the roots on a kiln they have for the purpose.
This passage reflects the heavier editorial hand applied to Gass’s published 1807 narrative, which often consolidates several days’ observations into compressed ethnographic descriptions. Where Clark notes only that “Indians caught Sammon & Sold us” and Ordway mentions Indians arriving “with droves of horses” and “a Small raft,” Gass pauses to explain the food economy that was sustaining the weakened party. The camas, ironically, is likely implicated in the very “relax” — dysentery — that Ordway diagnoses.
Convergences and Silences
All three narrators agree on the arrival of two chiefs and their families who encamped nearby, and on the trade in salmon. None names the chiefs. None remarks on the symbolic weight of the moment — the abandonment of horses for canoes — though Clark’s preoccupation with axe size and Ordway’s note about pitch pine signal an awareness of what the next phase will require. The collective portrait is of an exhausted, ill, and undersupplied party transitioning into a new mode of travel while dependent on Nez Perce hospitality for both food and forbearance.
