The entries of April 16, 1806, capture the Lewis and Clark expedition at a logistical pivot: the Columbia would no longer carry them, and horses had to be procured from the Skillute and Chilluckkittequaw villages. Captain Clark crossed the river with interpreters, Sacagawea, nine men, and a substantial portion of the trade goods. Captain Lewis remained in camp, where Sergeants Gass and Pryor supervised the manufacture of pack saddles. Four narrators describe the day, and the divergence among their accounts is instructive for how each man understood his role on the expedition.
Parallel Captains, Diverging Concerns
Lewis and Clark produce the day’s two longest entries, and their texts share a clear textual relationship. Clark’s journal opens with language nearly identical to Lewis’s: both record that Clark “passed the river with the two interpreters” and “nine men in order to trade with the natives for their horses.” Both note that “twelve horses will be sufficient to transport our baggage and some pounded fish.” The captains plainly compared notes, and one copied (or both drew from a common field memorandum).
Yet within this shared frame, their attention diverges sharply. Clark, on the ground at the Skillute village, writes as a negotiator and ethnographer:
The Chief Set before me a large platter of Onions which had been Sweeted. I gave a part of those onions to all my party and we all eate of them, in this State the root is very Sweet and the tops tender… Peter Cruzat played on the Violin and the men danced Several dances & retired to rest in the houses of the 1st and Second Cheif.
Lewis, left in camp, turns naturalist. He devotes the bulk of his entry to a currant in yellow bloom, a “pided grey and yellowish brown” squirrel new to him, and an extraordinarily detailed description of a black pheasant—down to the iris color, the eighteen tail feathers “tiped with bluish white,” and the orange-yellow stripe above the eye. Where Clark records diplomacy and dance, Lewis records taxonomy.
The Sergeants’ Registers
Ordway and Gass write in plainer registers, and their entries serve as useful checks on the captains. Ordway confirms the labor division Lewis describes—”Sergt Gass and 2 men Set at makeing pack Saddles”—and supplies a crucial commercial detail the captains soften: Clark “Sent back a part of the articles as the Indians asked more for their horses than our goods would admit of.” Lewis writes only that “they asked nearly half the merchindize I had with me for one horse,” while Ordway makes plain that goods were physically returned across the river before Clark moved upstream to try again.
Ordway also notes the squirrels independently—”2 Squerrells of a new kind of any we ever Saw before”—and adds that “Capt Lewis had the Skins Stuffed & taken care of.” This is a small but valuable corroboration: Lewis’s specimen-preparation work, which Lewis himself describes (“I had them skined leaving the head feet and tail to them and placed in the sun to dry”), is visible to the enlisted men and worth recording.
Gass, by contrast, offers the briefest account of the four. He omits the trading negotiations almost entirely, mentioning only that “Captain Clarke, with some of the men and some goods went over the river to endeavour to procure some horses.” Instead, Gass foregrounds his own day’s hunt: “I was out hunting this morning and killed a rattle-snake among the rocks.” He also describes the speckled squirrels in the homely terms of comparison—”as large as a common grey squirrel, but the tail not so bushy”—where Lewis reaches for systematic description.
What Each Narrator Sees
The day’s four entries demonstrate a recurring pattern in the journals. Lewis catalogues species and prepares specimens; Clark negotiates, observes village life, and notes that the Skillute settlement “is moved about 300 yards below the Spot it Stood last fall.” Ordway tracks logistics, including the unflattering fact that the first day of trading produced no horses and required the return of goods. Gass, the carpenter-sergeant whose published 1807 narrative would reach readers first, writes most economically and personally, recording the rattlesnake no other narrator mentions.
Read together, the entries reconstruct a single day more fully than any one of them alone: hunters out before dawn, saddles taking shape on the north bank, Lewis bent over a pheasant carcass with a knife, and Clark seven miles upriver eating sweated onions in a chief’s lodge while Cruzatte’s violin sounded against the Columbia night.
