The entries for April 29, 1806 capture a single logistical event — ferrying the Corps and its baggage across the Columbia at the mouth of the Walla Walla River — but the four extant journals diverge sharply in what each narrator chose to preserve. Yelleppit, the Walla Walla chief who had hosted the captains the previous evening, supplied two canoes for the crossing. By 11 A.M. the party and baggage were over; difficulty collecting the horses, and a warning from their guide that no water lay within reach before nightfall, persuaded the captains to encamp only a mile up the Walla Walla near a fishing weir. From that shared armature, the narrators build strikingly different records.
Lewis and Clark: Near-Identical Twins
The captains’ entries are, as is typical for this stretch of the return journey, almost word-for-word parallel — strong evidence that one copied from the other or that both worked from a common field draft. Lewis opens:
This morning Yellept furnished us with two canoes and we began to transport our baggage over the river; we also sent a party of the men over to collect the horses.
Clark’s version differs only in orthography and one substantive slip — he writes that they “purchased Some deer and chappellell this morning,” where Lewis has “dogs and shappellell.” Given that Lewis immediately adds “we had now a store of 12 dogs for our voyage through the plains” — a line Clark reproduces verbatim — Clark’s “deer” appears to be a transcription error rather than independent observation.
Both captains then devote the bulk of their entries to a meticulous description of the willow-curtain weir, the two types of seines used by the Walla Walla, and a geographic disquisition on the Walla Walla River, the range of hills separating Multnomah from Columbia drainages, and the headwaters of the Towannahiooks and LaPage. The technical, almost monographic register — “a simicircular bow of half the size of a man’s arm and about 5 feet long” — is the captains’ characteristic ethnographic mode.
Ordway: The Diplomatic Ledger
John Ordway, by contrast, attends to matters the captains omit entirely. Where Lewis and Clark mention the weir’s mechanics, Ordway names the catch in plainer terms — “large quantityes of Salmon trout, Suckers, &C.” — and he alone preserves the day’s gift exchange:
Cap.t Lewis made a chief gave him a meddle, he gave a fine horse in return as a present, another chief who Cap.t Clark made yesterday brought up an-other fine horse and made him a present of. we purchased another by giving a Small quantity of powder and ball.
This is significant. The captains’ own journals, on this date, do not record the medal ceremony or the reciprocal horse gifts — transactions central to the diplomatic and economic standing of the expedition. Ordway also offers the most direct character judgment of the day: “these natives are the kindest and the most friendly to us than any we have yet Seen,” and notes the recent Walla Walla war with the Snake nation. He closes with the small human detail of “one of our men lift a steel trap on the other side” — the kind of mundane loss the captains rarely bother to enter.
Gass: Compression and Provisions
Patrick Gass, whose published 1807 journal is consistently the tersest of the four, reduces the day to its provisioning bottom line. He notes the fair weather, the transport of baggage, the large encampment of natives on a creek entering from the south, and the acquisition of
three horses, some dogs, shap-a-leel, some roots called com-mas and other small roots, which were good to eat and nourishing.
Gass alone names the commas (camas) roots specifically, and he frames the encampment in terms of the larger native movement across the river — a scene of population flux that Lewis and Clark mention only obliquely.
Patterns Across the Four
Three patterns emerge. First, the captains’ shared text confirms again that by spring 1806 Lewis and Clark were operating from a common compositional process, with Clark introducing minor copying errors. Second, Ordway functions as the de facto diplomatic recorder, preserving the medal-and-horse exchange that the official journals elide. Third, register correlates with role: Gass writes as a quartermaster (counts, food, weather), Ordway as a sergeant attentive to social transactions, and the captains as natural philosophers documenting hydrography and indigenous technology. Reading the four together restores a fuller account of the day than any single entry provides.
