The loss of a perogue the previous day forced the Corps of Discovery into a logistical scramble on April 13, 1806. With four narrators writing from the same stretch of the Columbia near the Cascades, the day offers an unusually clear view of how rank, role, and writerly habit shaped what each man chose to record.
A Divided Command, A Divided Record
All four journals agree on the basic structure of the day: the cargo of the lost canoe was redistributed, the party set out at 8 A.M., and Lewis crossed to the south side with the smaller canoes to bargain at the Y-eh-huh (or Wey-eh-hoo) village while Clark continued up the north shore with the larger vessels. From there, the accounts diverge in instructive ways.
Lewis, writing with characteristic ethnographic ambition, is the only narrator to estimate the village’s military strength, noting it consisted of
11 houses crouded with inhabitants; it appeared to me that they could have mustered about 60 fighting men then present.
Gass, by contrast, reports a flatter number — “twelve lodges here” — and identifies the inhabitants as “the Wey-eh-hoo nation,” a spelling that differs from Lewis’s and Clark’s “Y-eh-huh” / “Y-ep-huh.” Ordway omits the village name entirely, calling it simply “2 villages [a] little above the Shoote.” The variation in orthography is typical of the expedition’s encounters with Sahaptin and Chinookan place-names, but the divergence in house-count (eleven versus twelve) suggests Gass was working from hearsay rather than direct observation, since he remained with Clark on the north bank.
The Price of a Canoe
The transaction at the village is recorded by three of the four narrators, and the small discrepancies are telling. Clark writes that Lewis purchased the two canoes “for two robes and four elkskins,” a figure Lewis confirms verbatim in his own entry — strong evidence that Clark drew on Lewis’s account, or that the two conferred before writing. Ordway, working independently from his sergeant’s vantage, gives a different tally:
had purchased two small canoes the price of which was 2 Small peaces of blue cloath and two Elk hides, & bought three dogs also
Whether Ordway misunderstood the goods exchanged or whether cloth and elk hides were both involved, his version preserves a detail — the blue cloth — that the captains suppress. Gass is the most laconic, simply noting that Lewis “got 2 canoes and 3 dogs from the inhabitants.” The pattern recurs throughout the journals: Ordway frequently records trade goods with a quartermaster’s specificity, while the captains generalize.
Dog Meat as Subsistence and Sentiment
Perhaps the most striking register difference appears in the treatment of the three dogs purchased at the village. Gass and Ordway note the acquisition without comment. Clark offers a brief endorsement: “the dogs now constitutes a considerable part of our Subsistance & with most of the party has become a favourable food. Certain I am that is a helthy Strong diet.” Lewis, expanding on what is clearly a shared draft, ventures into personal taste:
from habit it has become by no means disagreeable to me, I prefer it to lean venison or Elk, and is very far superior to the horse in any state.
The near-identical opening clauses in Lewis and Clark — “the dog now constitutes a considerable part of our subsistence” — confirm the captains’ habit of mutual borrowing during this leg of the return journey. Lewis’s added preference ranking is his alone, and reflects the more discursive, opinion-laden voice that distinguishes his prose from Clark’s terser field record.
The Missing Hunters
A subplot common to all four entries is the search for hunters dispatched two days earlier to Cruzatte’s River. Clark, walking up the river half a mile in person, and Lewis, ascending five miles on the south bank before halting to dine on dog, both convey the captains’ growing concern. Ordway notes that “Sergt Pryor & 2 men sent back to cruzattes River to look again for the hunters,” and Gass reports the same dispatch. Only Clark records his own solitary walk over the hills — a small assertion of independent action that his journal preserves more often than Lewis’s does. By sunset, Shields had returned with two black-tailed fallow deer, and the camp settled in twelve miles above the morning’s start.
This analysis was AI-assisted and reviewed by a human editor prior to publication.
