The entries of April 14, 1806 record a single day’s ascent of the Columbia between the rapids and the narrows, but the four surviving narrators frame the day’s significance through strikingly different lenses. The shared event — the rejoining of Sergeant Pryor’s hunting party at dawn, the morning wind, and the arrival at a village above Canoe Creek where horses grazed — becomes, in each journal, a different kind of document.
Lewis and Clark: The Captains’ Shared Draft
The captains’ entries are, as often in the return journey, very nearly identical in their opening movements. Both Lewis and Clark begin with the same sentence structure: “This morning at seven oCk. we were joined by Sergt. Pryor and the three hunters they brought with them 4 deer which Drewyer had killed yesterday.” Both proceed through the same observations on the river’s width (“from 1/2 to 3/4 of a mile”), the rocky bed, and Labiche’s River bringing sand down from Mount Hood. The textual dependence is unmistakable; one captain is copying or both are working from a shared field draft.
Yet small divergences accumulate. Lewis identifies the village inhabitants as “We-ock-sock, Wil-lacum,” while Clark records only “Wil-la-cum.” Lewis offers an extended geological hypothesis about the submerged pine trunks, dating the obstruction of the channel:
certain it is that those large pine trees never grew in that position, nor can I account for this phenomenon except it be that the passage of the river through the narrow pass at the rapids has been obstructed by the rocks which have fallen from the hills into that channel within the last 20 years
Clark abbreviates this entire chain of reasoning to a single deferral: “the Cause I have attempted to account for as I decended.” Where Lewis reasons in the present, Clark cross-references his own earlier writing — a habit consistent with his role as the expedition’s principal cartographer and record-keeper.
Clark also adds an ethnographic detail Lewis omits entirely: the subterranean houses near the village.
here I observed Several habitations under ground; they were Sunk about 8 feet deep and covered with Strong timber and Several feet of earth in a conic form… they are about 16 feet diamieter, nearly Circular, and are entered through a hole at top which appears to answer the double purpose of a Chimney and a dore.
This is precisely the kind of careful structural measurement Clark routinely supplies and Lewis routinely passes over in favor of botanical or geological reflection. Lewis dwells on the long-leafed pine superseding the fir; Clark notes the same tree but turns his attention to the architecture of an abandoned pit-house.
Ordway and Gass: The Sergeants’ Register
The enlisted journals run on a different register entirely. Patrick Gass compresses the day into a working itinerary: hunters return with four deer, the party departs, halts at a village with horses, stays three hours, proceeds to a creek with Indian lodges. Gass’s signature contribution is the meteorological note — “there has been no frost lately, except on the tops of the high hills” — a practical observation absent from the captains.
John Ordway’s entry sits between the captains’ detail and Gass’s brevity. Ordway alone reports the trade transaction in concrete terms:
we bought a number of dogs from the natives, they gave us such as they had to eat which was pounded Salmon thistle roots & wild onions & other kinds of roots all of which they had Sweeted & are Sweet, they are makeing Shappalell
Clark mentions the purchase of “five dogs, Some roots Chappalell, Philberds and dried berries,” but Ordway lingers on the food itself, on its sweetness, and on the Indigenous preparation of shappalell (the cous-root cake). Ordway also alone names the season’s expectation: the villagers “are Scattered along the River expecting the Salmon Soon.” Where Lewis abstracts and Clark catalogs, Ordway records the social and seasonal texture of the encounter.
Ordway is also the only narrator besides the captains to count the horses (“25 or 30”) — Gass simply notes “some horses,” while Lewis and Clark agree on “ten or a douzen” actually visible at the village. The discrepancy may reflect Ordway counting horses both at the village and on adjacent slopes.
What Each Narrator Sees
The shared emphasis across all four journals is the reappearance of horses — “the first we have seen since October last,” as Gass puts it, echoed almost verbatim by the captains. Yet only Lewis develops the observation into an argument about the ecological limits of horse-keeping along the lower Columbia, and only Clark pauses over the abandoned pit-houses. Gass timestamps the day; Ordway documents the trade and the cuisine; the captains theorize. The April 14 entries demonstrate how a single day’s ascent yielded four overlapping but non-redundant records — a reminder that the expedition’s documentary value depends on reading its narrators in chorus rather than in isolation.
