April 7, 1806 finds the Corps of Discovery encamped above the Cascades of the Columbia, drying the flesh of five elk Shannon had killed the previous day in preparation for the long push across the game-poor Columbia plains. The day’s events are modest—jerking meat, repairing rifle sights, trading unsuccessfully with visiting Sahhalah villagers, and observing a newly killed quail-like bird—yet the four surviving accounts diverge in striking ways that illuminate each narrator’s habits of mind.
Shared Skeleton, Divergent Detail
All four journals agree on the day’s basic structure: Drouillard and the Field brothers were dispatched ahead to hunt, the remainder of the party dried elk meat, and Indians from an upstream Sahhalah village visited camp. The close verbal parallels between Lewis and Clark are particularly conspicuous. Lewis writes that the meat was “secured in dryed Elkskins and put on board in readiness for an early departure,” while Clark records it was “Secured in dried Shaved Elk Skins and put on board in readiness for our early departure”—near-identical phrasing that confirms the well-documented pattern of Clark copying from Lewis (or both copying a shared field draft) during the return journey.
Yet the captains differ on a verifiable detail: Lewis places the Sahhalah village “about 8 miles above us,” while Clark writes “about 12 miles above us.” Both also describe the lead-stealing incident in nearly identical language. Lewis: “I detected one of them in steeling a peice of lead and sent him from camp.” Clark: “one of them was detected in Stealing a piece of Lead. I Sent him off imedeately.” The shift from Lewis’s active voice to Clark’s passive construction is characteristic of how Clark sometimes softened or generalized Lewis’s first-person assertions when transcribing.
The Quail: A Study in Register
Nothing illustrates the gulf between expedition narrators more sharply than their treatment of a single small bird killed by Reubin Field. Patrick Gass dispatches it in eleven words:
one of our hunters killed a beautiful small bird of the quail kind.
John Ordway does not mention the bird at all, instead noting that “Drewyer returned with the Savages and killed 2 ducks this evening.” Clark omits the quail entirely from his April 7 entry, devoting his attention instead to geographic intelligence about the Multnomah and Clackamas rivers.
Lewis, by contrast, produces what amounts to a formal natural-history monograph running several hundred words. He methodically catalogs the bird’s plumage region by region:
the upper part of the head, sides and back of the neck, including the croop and about 1/3 of the under part of the body is of a bright dove coloured blue… from the crown of the head two long round feathers extend backwards nearly in the direction of the beak and are of a black colour.
This is the mountain quail (Oreortyx pictus), and Lewis’s description—proceeding from head to tail, comparing structure to “our common partridge” of Virginia while carefully distinguishing plumage—is the kind of disciplined zoological writing that justifies his reputation as the expedition’s primary naturalist. The contrast with Gass’s “beautiful small bird” could not be more complete: same specimen, same camp, two utterly different epistemological projects.
What Each Narrator Notices
The day’s entries also reveal each narrator’s distinctive preoccupations. Ordway alone records the trade goods in commercial detail—”a fiew dogs a little chapellel & roots”—and is the only narrator to mention mosquitoes (“the Musquetoes trouble us a little”), a small environmental observation the captains pass over. Gass alone explains the strategic logic of drying meat by reference to Indian testimony: the plains tribes “are in a starving condition, and will continue so until the salmon begin to run.” This indirect ethnographic reporting—what the natives say about their own circumstances—is a Gass hallmark.
Clark devotes the bulk of his entry to cartographic intelligence gathered from “an old indian” who marked the Multnomah on the sand, confirming a sketch Clark had received from other informants and adding the Clackamas River heading in Mount Jefferson. Clark’s eye remains fixed on the map he is building; Lewis’s, on the bird in his hand. Both captains note that the Sahhalah trade failed because the asking prices were too high—Clark calling them “enormous”—a small economic detail that helps explain why the party would press on with elk jerky rather than fresh wappato and roots.
Together, the four entries from April 7 demonstrate how a single uneventful day at the Cascades produces four genuinely different documents: Gass’s compressed practical summary, Ordway’s mercantile and weather-conscious log, Clark’s geographic synthesis, and Lewis’s expansive natural history.
