The journals of April 5, 1806 offer an unusually rich opportunity for cross-narrator comparison. Lewis, Clark, Ordway, and Gass all wrote from the same camp above the Cascades of the Columbia, where the Corps was waiting on damp weather to finish drying elk meat for the journey across the Columbia plains. The four entries describe overlapping events but differ markedly in register, detail, and emphasis.
Parallel Texts: Lewis and Clark in Lockstep
The most striking pattern is the near-verbatim correspondence between the Lewis and Clark entries. Both open with the same complaint about the morning’s cloud cover preventing lunar observation with Aquila, and both proceed through the same sequence: Fields and Drewyer’s departure, Ordway’s detail sent to assist Pryor, the return of inadequately dried meat at 1 p.m., and the orderly behavior of visiting natives. Clark writes:
at 1 p.m.the party returned with the meat. it was not Sufficiently dryed to keep. we had it cut thiner and redryed over a fire this evening
Lewis records the same event in nearly identical phrasing:
at 1 P. M the party returned with the meat. it had been so illy dryed that we feared it would not keep. we therefore directed it to be cut thinner and redryed over a fire this evening
The shared language confirms the well-documented pattern of one captain copying from the other — a habit that makes their small divergences especially telling. Lewis adds a naturalist’s flourish absent from Clark’s account: a measured fallen fir tree “318 feet including the stump,” notes on the unusual size of local dogwood (“sometimes the stem is nearly 2 feet in diameter”), and a catalogue of birds and insects including the “Blue crested Corvus” and “mellow bug.” Lewis also preserves a piece of practical hunting lore from Drewyer:
Drewyer informed me that he never knew a female bear return to her young when they had been allarmed by a person and once compelled to leave them.
Clark, by contrast, leans toward botanical inventory of the camp prairie — pashequo, shannetahque, compound fern, water cress, narrow dock — and gives a more thorough geographical sketch of the country flanking the river to its mouth.
Ordway’s Independent Eye
Ordway’s entry stands apart. Where the captains record administrative details, Ordway captures the strategic rationale for the camp’s prolonged stay — information that Lewis and Clark, perhaps because it was self-evident to them, do not foreground:
the natives above the great falls have no provisions and many are dieing with hunger, this information has been so repeatedly given by different parties of Indians that it does not admit of any doubt and is the cause of our delay in this neighbourhood for the purpose of procureing as much dryed Elk meat as will last us through the Columbia plains
This passage is one of the clearest statements in any of the journals of why the Corps lingered at this particular camp. Ordway also notes the human traffic accompanying that scarcity: families “passing down with their famillys from the country above into the vally of Columbia in Search of food.” His description of the great fir — “100 and 4 feet in length” — measures a standing tree where Lewis measured a fallen one, suggesting the men were independently impressed by Columbia timber and reaching for superlatives.
Gass: The Brief Soldier’s Notebook
Gass, true to form, contributes the shortest and most concrete entry. He notices what the officers omit: the stripped bark of the white cedar, used by the natives “both for food and clothing,” and the leather garments of the women, “somewhat in the form of a truss.” His ethnographic bluntness — uninflected by the captains’ more decorous register — supplies the kind of street-level observation that Lewis and Clark’s parallel narratives systematically smooth out.
One small mystery threads all four entries: the three black bear cubs. Gass himself had returned that morning with Collins and Windsor, having failed to kill the mother but bringing in the cubs. Ordway notes only that the cubs “was sold to the Savages.” Lewis and Clark agree that the natives “fancied those Petts and gave us wappato in exchange for them.” The trade encapsulates the day in miniature: a hunting party’s failure converted, via Native interest, into the very root food the Corps was stockpiling for the route ahead.
