The expedition’s descent of the lower Snake River on October 11, 1805 produced two substantive journal entries — one from Captain William Clark, the other from Sergeant Patrick Gass — that overlap in subject matter while diverging sharply in observational depth and ethnographic curiosity. A third narrator nominally “present,” Sergeant John Ordway, supplies an entry from a different date entirely, a reminder that the journals were not always kept in synchronized fashion.
Parallel Itineraries, Divergent Detail
Both Clark and Gass structure their entries around the day’s progress through a series of rapids and stops at Indian lodges to trade for provisions. Gass, characteristically economical, summarizes:
ceeded on about 6 miles, and halted at some lodges of the natives, where we gof fish and several dogs. We continued here about an hour and then went on. No accident happened to day though we passed some bad rapids.
Clark covers the same sequence but counts more carefully — “passed a rapid at two miles,” “at 6 miles we came too at Some Indian lodges,” “at 9 mile passed a rapid,” “at 15 miles halted at an Indian Lodge” — and tallies “nine rapids all of then great fishing places.” Gass renders the day’s distance as 30 miles without enumerating the rapids individually. The pattern is consistent with what readers of both journals will recognize: Clark functions as the expedition’s primary geographer and ethnographer, while Gass distills the day into a soldier’s after-action summary.
Both men note the trade in dogs and fish, and both record the encounter near evening with “an Indian of another nation” (Gass) or “an Indian of a nation near the mouth of this river” (Clark). Gass adds an intelligence detail Clark omits — that this informant said “we could get to the falls in 4 days” — and offers his own deduction that the falls “are not very high as the salmon come above them in abundance.” This is Gass at his most analytical, reasoning from observed natural history to infer geography.
The Sweat House and the Graveyards
The most consequential divergence concerns ethnographic observation. Clark records two features of Native life along the Snake that Gass does not mention at all. The first is a Nez Perce or Palouse sweat lodge:
at this place I saw a curious Swet house under ground, with a Small whole at top to pass in or throw in the hot Stones, which those in threw on as much water as to create the temporature of heat they wished
The second is the burial practice he observed near abandoned fishing houses: “near each of those houses we observe Grave yards picketed, or pieces of wood stuck in permiscuesly over the grave or body which is Covered with earth.” Clark also explains, on the authority of “our Chiefs” — the Nez Perce guides traveling with the corps — why the riverside houses stand empty: the inhabitants “are out in the Plain on each side of the river hunting the antilope.”
Gass registers none of this. His ethnographic interest on October 11 runs instead toward the mess kettle: “Most of our people having been accustomed to meat, do not relish the fish, but prefer dog meat; which, when well cooked, tastes very well.” The note is invaluable in its own register — a candid report on enlisted-men’s preferences that the captain, focused on architecture and mortuary custom, does not provide.
The Treeless Plain and the Ordway Problem
Both Clark and Gass dwell on the absence of timber. Gass: “The country on both sides is high dry prairie plains without a stick of timber… it is with difficulty we can get enough to cook with.” Clark: “an open plain leavel & fertile after assending a Steep assent of about 200 feet not a tree of any kind to be Seen on the river.” The convergence is striking and likely independent — the firewood shortage was a practical problem affecting every man in the corps, and both writers describe the same dark, rounded river stones as well, though Gass elaborates the geological detail more fully.
Ordway’s journal entry tagged to this date in fact records December 12, 1805, at Fort Clatsop: “a number of the Clatsop Indians visited us. we finished raiseing one line of our huts.” The mismatch underscores a recurring challenge in collating the expedition record: not every nominally “present” narrator wrote on every day, and database alignments by date can mask substantial silences. For October 11, the lower Snake speaks through Clark’s measured ethnography and Gass’s plainspoken commissary report — but not through Ordway.
