The entries of September 27, 1805, written from Canoe Camp on the Clearwater River, capture a turning point in the expedition: the men, having descended from the Bitterroots, were beginning the laborious task of constructing five dugout canoes for the journey to the Pacific. Yet the three surviving accounts — by John Ordway, Patrick Gass, and William Clark — diverge sharply in tone, scope, and detail, illustrating how rank, role, and literary habit shaped each narrator’s record.
Labor, Illness, and the Return of Colter
Ordway’s entry is the most narrowly focused of the three. As a sergeant tasked with daily reporting, he documents the work assignment with bureaucratic precision:
five differeent parties and went at falling five pitch pine trees for 5 canoes, all near our Encampments
He notes the return of “the man who went back to the Mountains for the 2 horses” — a reference to John Colter, whom Ordway leaves unnamed — and records the recovery of one horse and a portion of a deer. Ordway says nothing of the widespread illness that dominates the other two accounts.
Clark, by contrast, produces two entries for the day (a draft and a fair copy), and both foreground the deteriorating health of the party. In his expanded version he writes:
all the men able to work comened building 5 Canoes, Several taken Sick at work, our hunters returned Sick without meet… Capt Lewis very Sick nearly all the men Sick.
Where Ordway counts trees, Clark counts bodies. He also identifies Colter by name, specifies that Colter “gave the Indians” half the deer — a detail of diplomacy absent from Ordway — and adds an ethnographic observation entirely missing from his sergeants’ journals: “our Shoshonee Indian Guide employed himself makeing flint points for his arrows.” This glimpse of Old Toby maintaining traditional craft at the edge of the expedition’s camp is the kind of incidental detail that Clark, as co-commander with broader observational responsibilities, was uniquely positioned to record.
Gass and the Shadow of the Editor
Gass’s entry presents a different problem. Published in 1807 after heavy editorial reworking by David McKeehan, his account reads with a polish absent from the manuscript journals. Gass offers narrative context the others omit — the march toward the river, the character of the valley, the breadth of the stream:
The valley is level and lightly timbered with pine and spruce trees. The soil is thin except in some small plains, where it is of the first quality… we arrived at the camp of our hunters on a river about 100 yards broad, a branch of the Columbia.
Yet Gass’s chronology appears displaced: he describes arrival at the hunters’ camp and the killing of “5 deer” as if it were the day’s principal event, while Clark and Ordway treat the camp as already established and the canoe-building as the day’s labor. The discrepancy likely reflects Gass’s habit (or McKeehan’s editorial habit) of consolidating several days’ movement into a single retrospective passage.
Gass alone records a medical detail of considerable interest: “Captain Clarke gave all the sick a dose of Rush’s Pills, to see what effect that would have.” Clark, who administered the pills, does not mention them. Ordway, who likely received one, does not mention them either. That the chief carpenter — busy supervising canoe construction — is the only narrator to preserve this episode suggests how arbitrary the survival of historical detail can be.
Patterns of Attribution and Silence
Three patterns emerge across the entries. First, naming: Clark identifies Colter; Ordway and Gass refer only to “the man.” Second, diagnosis of cause: Gass attributes the sickness to “the change of diet,” Clark simply records its extent, and Ordway ignores it altogether. Third, register: Ordway’s prose is terse and operational, Clark’s is layered and observational, and Gass’s — filtered through McKeehan — is the most literary, complete with descriptions of soil quality and serviceberry bushes that read more like a settler’s prospectus than a field journal.
Read together, the three entries recover what no single account preserves: a hot day on the Clearwater, men felling pitch pine while their captains lay sick, an Indian guide knapping arrowheads, and a lone hunter returning from the Bitterroots with half a deer and one of two lost horses.
