April 15, 1806, found the Corps of Discovery moving up the Columbia near The Dalles, attempting at village after village to purchase horses for the overland return. The day’s failure is recorded by all four extant journalists — Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway — providing an unusually rich opportunity to examine how the same events were filtered through four sensibilities and four levels of access.
The Captains in Lockstep
The journals of Lewis and Clark for this date are, as so often in 1806, nearly identical in structure and content. Both open with the same sentence — “We delayed this morning untill after breakfast in order to purchase some horses of the Indians” — and both proceed through the same itinerary: the inspection of Sepulchre Rock, the unsuccessful bargaining at the village near Cataract River, the further failures at the Chilluckkittequaw villages, and arrival at rock fort camp at the mouth of Quinnett Creek. Clark’s spelling (“Sepulchar,” “Cerface,” “Sucksess”) differs from Lewis’s more polished orthography (“sepulchre,” “surface,” “success”), but the underlying text is shared. Both captains close with the same ethnographic description of dress among the people above the rapids, noting their porcupine-quill ornamentation, fox-skin aprons, and the distinctive forehead-cut hair with squared earlocks.
Crucially, both Lewis and Clark identify the specific obstacle to trade. The Indians, Lewis writes,
wanted an instrumet which the Northwest traders call an eye-dag which we had not.
Clark records the identical detail with minor spelling variation. This shared specificity — naming a trade item by its Northwest Company name — suggests the captains had been told this directly and recognized its significance: the Columbia trade network had already standardized around British goods the expedition could not supply.
What Ordway Saw That the Captains Compressed
Sergeant Ordway’s entry, while clearly informed by the same day’s events, preserves details the captains’ parallel narratives flatten. Where Lewis and Clark mention Sepulchre Rock with administrative brevity (“thirteen sepulchres… about 2 acres above highwater mark”), Ordway describes what was inside:
they saw seven large sepulchers made of wood in a square form and by appearence is nearly a hundred persons piled in one on another with their robes Sowed round them, and all their heads down the River
The orientation of the dead — heads pointed downriver — is a striking ethnographic observation absent from the captains’ account. Ordway also notes the reason horses were not for sale beyond the price problem: the natives “Sign to us that they hunt and go to wa[r] with their horses,” a functional explanation the captains omit. Ordway alone records the green spring plains, the horses “in good order as they have been wintered below in the narrow bottoms where the rushes abound,” and the “cellers” of an ancient abandoned village at their campsite — the sort of landscape detail that gives the day texture.
Gass and the Question of Fleas
Sergeant Gass, writing in the most compressed register of the four, records the day in a single paragraph but contributes a detail no one else mentions: shapelell bread. “Here we got some Shap-e-leel,” he writes, “a kind of bread the natives make of roots, and bake in the sun; and which is strong and palatable.” Neither captain mentions this transaction, though both acknowledge dogs were procured. Gass also offers a piece of speculative ethnography that is entirely his own:
passed a place where there was a village in good order last fall when we went down; but has been lately torn down, and again erected at a short distance from the old ground where it formerly stood. The reason of this removal I cannot conjecture, unless to avoid the fleas, which are more numerous in this country than any insects I ever saw.
The flea hypothesis — characteristic of Gass’s willingness to speculate where the captains will not — is the kind of vernacular reasoning that distinguishes his published narrative from the official journals.
Patterns of Authorship
The day illustrates a pattern visible throughout the return journey: Lewis and Clark write in tandem, often word-for-word, producing an authoritative but selective record; Ordway, working independently, captures sensory and ethnographic detail the captains compress; Gass, writing for eventual publication, foregrounds the practical and the curious. Only by reading all four does the texture of April 15 emerge — the failed bargaining, the eye-dag the Corps did not possess, the bread of roots, the hundred bodies in their robes facing downriver toward the sea.
