March 30, 1806, marks the expedition’s first full day of upriver travel after departing Fort Clatsop. The four surviving journals from this date — by Patrick Gass, John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis — describe the same stretch of the Columbia River along Wappato Island, but the differences in length, focus, and register reveal much about how each man understood his task as a recorder.
Two Registers: The Sergeants’ Brevity and the Captains’ Catalog
Gass and Ordway, the two enlisted-rank diarists, produce compact entries that emphasize landscape, weather, and a shared admiration for Native watercraft. Gass writes that the expedition
set out early accompanied by several of the natives in canoes. The river is very high, overflowing all its banks. We passed some villages of the natives on Wapto island, which is about 20 miles long and one broad, but did not halt at any of them.
Ordway covers the same ground but adds meteorological and geographic flourishes the others omit — most notably the distant volcanoes:
Saw mount rainey and Mount Hood which is verry white with Snow.
Both sergeants then arrive, almost in unison, at the day’s most quotable observation — praise for Native canoe-building. Gass declares the natives “ought to have the credit of making the finest canoes, perhaps in the world, both as to service and beauty,” while Ordway, evidently working from a similar impression (or possibly comparing notes at camp), writes that he must
give these Savages as well as those on the coast the praise of makeing the neatest and handsomest lightest best formed canoes I ever Saw.
The parallel phrasing — “finest canoes, perhaps in the world” beside “neatest and handsomest lightest best formed canoes I ever Saw” — is one of the clearest moments in the whole expedition record where Gass and Ordway appear to have either drafted in conversation or settled independently on a shared expedition consensus.
Lewis and Clark: Near-Identical Ethnography
The captains’ entries, by contrast, are dense ethnographic logs running several times the length of the sergeants’. Clark and Lewis cover the same incidents in the same order: the morning meeting with three Clan-nah-minna-mun men, the encounter with Claxtar and Cathlahcumup canoes, the breakfast halt at the November 4th campsite, the visit from Clan-nah-quah and Mult-no-mah traders, the purchase of sturgeon and wappato, the pointing-out of the Shoto village behind its pond, and the evening camp at the site of Clark’s stolen tomahawk.
The textual relationship between the two captains is unusually tight on this date. Compare Clark’s account of the trade:
we purchased of those visitors a Sturgion and Some Wappato & quarmarsh roots for which we gave Small fishing hooks.
With Lewis’s:
from these visiters we purchased a sturgeon and some wappetoe and pashequa, for which we gave some small fishinghooks. these like the natives below are great higglers in dealing.
The structural identity is obvious, but the divergences are revealing. Clark uses “quarmarsh” (camas) where Lewis writes “pashequa” — different Indigenous loanwords for overlapping root foods. Lewis adds the editorial aside about “higglers,” a register Clark avoids. And where Clark closes his entry with a comparative ethnographic note that the valley peoples “differ but little in either their dress, manners, habuts and language from the Clat Sops Chinnooks,” Lewis instead inserts a botanical paragraph identifying the sagittaria Sagittifolia by its Linnaean binomial and cataloging the cottonwood, ash, and sweet willow on Wappato Island.
Who Notices What
Each narrator preserves details the others miss. Only Ordway records the snowy peaks of Mount Rainier and Mount Hood. Only Gass mentions the “large pond on the north side of the river” near camp without ethnographic elaboration. Only Lewis gives the Linnaean name for wappato and notes that “the black alder common on the coast has now disappeared” — a botanist’s marker of ecological transition. Only Clark observes that “The men are Stouter and much better formed than those of the Sea Coast,” and only Clark records the small human coda: “Soon after I had got into bead an Indian came up alone in a Small Canoe.”
Lewis closes with a precise mileage — “having traveled 23 M” — that none of the others provide, while Clark alone tallies the day’s hunt: “Jo. Field Shot at Elk he killed and brought in a fine duck.” Read together, the four entries form a layered composite: Gass and Ordway supply the mood and the sky, Clark the social and hunting record, Lewis the science and the distances. No single journal would convey what the four together preserve of this single day’s ascent past Wappato Island.
