The expedition’s ascent of the Columbia on April 6, 1806 produced four overlapping accounts of a single day: a 9 A.M. departure, a roughly nine-mile pull upriver, and a halt at the hunters’ camp where Gibson, Shannon, and others had killed elk. All four narrators — Patrick Gass, John Ordway, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark — agree on the bones of the day. Their divergences, however, expose how differently each man understood the work of journal-keeping.
One Camp, Four Counts
The arithmetic of the elk hunt itself shifts between journals. Ordway records that the hunters “having killed 3 Elk” but that “in the evening the men returned with the meat of 5 Elk having found 2 more than they expected.” Gass, writing at slightly greater remove, collapses the sequence and simply reports “They had killed 5 elk.” Lewis and Clark, the captains, both note three killed and two wounded so badly the party expected to recover them — Lewis writing that the hunters “had killed three Elk this morning and wounded two others so badly that they expected to get them,” and Clark echoing almost verbatim, “they had killed 3 Elk at no great distance and Wounded two others so badly that we expect to precure them.”
The near-identity of the captains’ phrasing on this point is characteristic of the Lewis–Clark working relationship in 1806: shared field notes, parallel composition, and a common vocabulary for hunt arithmetic. Ordway, hearing the news as it developed across the day, captures the unfolding revision; Gass, writing up the day later, smooths the count to its final figure.
Lewis the Geographer, Clark the Ornithologist
The most striking divergence is in what each man chose as the day’s principal subject. Lewis devotes his entry to the geography of the lower Columbia, using a rock at the November 3 campsite as a flood gauge:
I think the flood of this spring has been about 12 feet higher than it was at that time; the river is here about 11/2 miles wide; it’s general width from the beacon rock which may be esteemed the head of tide water, to the marshey islands is from one to 2 miles.
He fixes Beacon Rock as the head of tidewater, estimates its height at “seven hundred feet,” and then pivots into a recapitulation of Clark’s April 2 reconnaissance toward the Multnomah, naming the Na-cha-co-lee village of the E-lute and the Ne-er-cho-ki-oo of the Shah’ha-la. Lewis is, as so often, building the expedition’s master geography.
Clark, on the same day, writes almost nothing about the river. Instead he devotes the bulk of his entry to a single bird — the quail Reubin Field shot near camp, which Ordway had simply called “a curious handsom bird which made a curious noises… blue feathers on its breast… 2 long feathers on the top of its head.” Where Ordway gives roughly two sentences, Clark gives a full natural-history description running to several hundred words:
the upper part of the head, Sides and back of the neck, including the Croop and about 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. the length of these feathers is 21/2 inches.
This is the mountain quail (Oreortyx pictus), and Clark’s description — likely drafted in coordination with Lewis, whose specimen-handling vocabulary it borrows — is among the more meticulous bird descriptions in the journals. Gass, by contrast, omits the quail entirely. His interest is economic and ethnographic: he names the Columbia valley as “a fine valley about 70 miles long, abounding with roots of different kinds, which the natives use for food, especially the Wapto roots.”
Register and Editorial Voice
The four entries together map a clear hierarchy of register. Ordway writes the freshest field notes — present-tense, sequential, with the day’s surprises (“2 more than they expected”) preserved as surprises. Gass, whose published 1807 narrative was edited by David M’Keehan, shows the editorial hand plainly: his entry carries a footnote citing Alexander Mackenzie on the use of inner bark for food, a comparison no field journalist would insert mid-march. Lewis writes for posterity and for Jefferson, building a geography of tidewater and tributaries. Clark, on this date, writes as the expedition’s working naturalist, transferring a specimen into prose.
What no narrator records is equally telling. None mentions the two Indians Clark notes “Came last night very late to our Camp and continued all night” — except Clark himself. Lewis observes only that “these people are constantly hanging about us,” a phrase whose dismissive cast contrasts with Clark’s matter-of-fact hospitality. On a quiet day of drying meat, the journals diverge most where each narrator’s deepest preoccupation lies.
