The journal entries of April 17, 1806, capture the Lewis and Clark expedition at a moment of strategic difficulty along the Columbia near the Long Narrows. With the party divided — Clark upriver attempting to purchase horses, Lewis downriver supervising preparations — the four surviving accounts reveal how the same day looked from radically different vantage points. The contrast between Clark’s frustrated commercial diary, Lewis’s expansive naturalist meditation, and the brief notations of Gass and Ordway illuminates not only the events but the hierarchy of information within the expedition itself.
Clark’s Failed Bargains
William Clark produces by far the longest entry of the day, and it is dominated by the mechanics of trade. He describes rising early, taking a position near the village, and laying out his merchandise on a rock he calls “an elegable Situation.” His method was systematic: he divided goods into parcels, each calibrated as the price of one horse. The natives, he writes, “tanterlised me the greater part of the day.”
The negotiation with the principal chief becomes a small drama in miniature:
I made a bargin with the Chief who has more horses than all the village besides for 2 horses. Soon after he Canseled his bargin, and we again bargined for 3 horses, they were brought forward, and only one fit for Service, the others had Such intolerable backs as to render them entirely unfit for Service.
Clark’s refusal to accept the unfit horses ended the bargain entirely. He eventually secured three horses from individual sellers and resolved to remain another night. The entry closes with an ethnographic detail recorded almost in passing: he slept in the house of the second chief, where “they had not any thing except fish to eate and no wood for fire.” The poverty of the host’s table — given the importance of hospitality in the cultural protocols of the Columbia — is a telling note Clark records without comment.
Lewis’s Parallel Universe
While Clark wrestled with horse-traders, Meriwether Lewis at the lower camp wrote in an entirely different register. His entry opens with logistics — sending out hunters, setting hands to making packsaddles — but quickly opens into the kind of expansive natural-history observation for which his journals are prized. He notes the absence of sturgeon above the Columbian valley, the natives’ subsistence on “a small indifferent mullet,” and then turns lyrical about the changing climate at the edge of the plains:
even at this place which is merely on the border of the plains of Columbia the climate seems to have changed the air feels dryer and more pure… the plain is covered with a rich virdure of grass and herbs from four to nine inches high and exhibits a beautiful) seen particularly pleasing after having been so long imprisoned in mountains and those almost impenetrably thick forrests of the seacoast.
Lewis also records that Joseph Fields brought him three eggs of the “party coloured corvus” (the magpie), describing their coloration with characteristic precision. Only after these observations does he turn to Clark’s predicament, recounting the receipt of Cruzatte and Willard’s note and his decision to dispatch Shannon back with instructions to “double the price we have heretofore offered for horses.” The strategic logic is clear: delay at the narrows would be costly, and obtaining mounts here would let the party push to where horses were “more abundant and cheaper.”
The Sergeants’ Compressions
Patrick Gass and John Ordway, working from the lower camp with Lewis, produce briefer entries that compress the day’s events. Gass is the most laconic, noting only that the party “made 12 pack-saddles” and that the hunters killed a deer. He records simply that “Captain Clarke still remains over the river.”
Ordway, characteristically more expansive than Gass, supplies details neither captain records. He notes that “the Small birds of different kinds are Singing around us” — a small lyrical touch that echoes Lewis’s mood without copying his language. More substantively, Ordway preserves a piece of intelligence absent from the captains’ entries: an Indian visitor told the camp “that he had killed 2 Indians on this ground in a battle some years ago as they were at war with Some nations to the Southward.” This kind of native testimony, recorded by a sergeant but missed (or omitted) by Lewis, reminds modern readers that the enlisted journalists sometimes captured ethnographic details the captains overlooked.
The four entries, read together, demonstrate the layered nature of the expedition’s documentary record. Clark gives the commercial narrative, Lewis the scientific and strategic frame, Gass the bare logistical fact, and Ordway the human texture of the camp — the birdsong, the visiting warrior’s old story.
