The journals of April 23, 1806 offer an unusually rich opportunity for cross-narrator comparison. Lewis, Clark, Ordway, and Gass each describe the same overland push along the north bank of the Columbia toward the Wah-how-pum village, but the four accounts diverge in detail, register, and emphasis in ways that illuminate how the expedition’s documentary record was actually constructed.
The Lost Horse: Lewis and Clark in Near-Lockstep
The captains’ entries for this day are so closely parallel that they almost certainly represent shared composition or one copying the other’s draft. Clark opens:
at day light this morning we were informed that the two horses of our interpreter Shabono were missing on enquirey we were informed that he had neglected to tie up his horses as derected last evening.
Lewis records nearly the identical sequence:
At day light this morning we were informed that the two horses of our Interpreter Charbono were absent; on enquiry it appeared that he had neglected to confine them to picquts as had been directed last evening.
Both name Reubin Fields and Labiche as the dispatched searchers, both record the 8 A.M. departure of Gass with the small canoe, and both note the 10 A.M. unsuccessful return. The verbal echoes (“timely stage,” “all important” / “a great object with us”) confirm a shared draft. Yet small divergences matter. Clark notes that Charbonneau and Labiche “took a circle around on the hills,” a topographic detail Lewis abstracts as “suched the plains on either hand.” Lewis, more administratively minded, adds that during the delay “we had two packsaddles made” — a detail Clark omits but which Ordway independently confirms (“made two pack Saddles”).
Ordway and Gass: The Enlisted Perspective
Sergeant Gass, characteristically terse, condenses the entire day into a few sentences. He never mentions Charbonneau by name, reducing the morning’s drama to a single line: “A horse had got away last night and could not be found.” Gass, who was himself piloting the small canoe under Clark’s direction, foregrounds the labor: “we had very laborious work in getting along.”
Ordway’s entry occupies a middle register — longer than Gass, less polished than the captains, and attentive to sensory and social texture the officers downplay. He alone records the spring landscape:
the day warm, towards evening we arived at a large village at the mouth of a creek where we Camped… the prarie covred with flowrs.
Ordway also notes a logistical problem the captains pass over: “our horses are troublesome as the most of them are Studs.” And only Ordway explicitly records the continued presence of the Nez Perce escort: “Several of the flat heads continue on with us & assist us as much as lyes in their power.”
The Wah-how-pum Dance: Three Descriptions, One Event
The evening’s dance produces the day’s most revealing cross-narrator divergence. Ordway dispatches it in a single comparative sentence — “they had a dance at our fire this evening, nearly the Same manner & way as those on the Missourie” — and notes the reciprocal performance: “we played the fiddle and danced.”
Clark, by contrast, supplies ethnographic specificity:
they dance different from any Indians I have Seen. they dance with their Sholders together and pass from Side to Side, defferent parties passing each other, from 2 to 7. and 4 parties danceing at the Same time and Concluding the dance by passing promiscuisly throu & beetween each other.
Lewis expands the same observation with greater structural clarity, adding the detail of the encircling singers:
they formed a circle and all sung as well the spectators as the dancers who performed within the circle. these placed their sholders together with their robes tightly drawn about them and danced in a line from side to side.
That Lewis specifies “robes tightly drawn about them” where Clark does not suggests Lewis observed independently rather than simply transcribing Clark — a useful caution against assuming the captains’ parallel entries are wholly derivative. Ordway’s flat comparison to Missouri River dances reveals how much ethnographic discrimination the captains were performing that the sergeants were not.
Patterns Across the Four Accounts
The day’s records confirm a recurring hierarchy of detail: Lewis and Clark share a documentary substrate (likely drafted together each evening); Ordway captures social and environmental texture the captains compress; Gass reduces everything to operational essentials. Only by reading all four together does the full day emerge — Charbonneau’s negligence, the packsaddle work, the Nez Perce escort, the prairie in bloom, the trade in dogs and shappalell, and the line-and-circle dance of the Wah-how-pum.
