The entries for March 27, 1806 capture the Corps of Discovery a few days into its return ascent of the Columbia, halting at Skillute (Cowlitz) houses on the south side of the river. All four narrators record the same core events — an early start, a hospitable reception, a meal of fish and roots, the declined invitation to hunt, and a resumed voyage past the mouth of the Cowlitz. What differs is the register, the depth of ethnographic observation, and — most revealingly — the textual relationship between the captains’ two journals.
Parallel Captains, Divergent Sergeants
Lewis and Clark’s entries for this date are nearly word-for-word duplicates, a pattern familiar to readers of the return journals. Lewis writes that the Skillutes gave the party
dryed Anchovies, Sturgeon, wappetoe, quamash, and a speceis of small white tuberous roots about 2 inches in length and as thick as a man’s finger; these are eaten raw, are crisp, milkey, and agreeably flavored.
Clark renders the same sentence with only orthographic variation — “pashaquaw roots” in place of Lewis’s “quamash,” and “crips” for “crisp” — but otherwise reproduces the description verbatim. The shared paragraph on Skillute numbers, dress, recent war with the Chinnooks, and the carrying trade conducted by the Clatsops, Cathlahmahs, and Wahkiakums is likewise a single composition appearing in two hands. Whether Clark copied from Lewis or both worked from a common field draft, the convergence demonstrates the captains’ deliberate practice of pooling ethnographic material on the homeward journey, when they had leisure to expand the record they had compressed during the outbound rush.
Gass and Ordway: The Enlisted View
Sergeants Gass and Ordway, writing independently, give the day a different shape. Gass is the most concise, leading with mileage and weather:
embarked early and went about 6 miles, when we came to a small Indian village, where the natives received us very kindly. They belong to the Chil-ook nation, and differ something in their language from the Chin-ooks.
Where the captains identify their hosts as Skillutes, Gass classes them as a variant of “Chil-ook,” suggesting that the finer distinctions among Lower Columbia peoples were either not communicated to the rank and file or not retained by them. Gass alone records the practical detail that two small canoes were dispatched ahead to Deer Island to hunt — a logistical note Ordway corroborates (“Six of our hunters Sent on this afternoon to deer Island with the Small canoes in order to hunt”) but which the captains pass over.
Ordway’s entry sits between the registers. He names the nation correctly as “Chilutes,” notes the gift of “wapatoes & anchoves,” and uniquely supplies a place name the captains omit from their narrative paragraph: the camp “at the m° of a River named Calams River” — that is, the Kalama. Neither Lewis nor Clark mentions the Kalama by name in the entries above, though both describe the Cowlitz at length. Ordway’s notation thus preserves a toponym the captains’ more discursive ethnography crowds out.
What Each Narrator Notices
The sturgeon purchase is a useful test case. Gass renders it concretely: the party “got a large one out of a small canoe; a number of which followed us with 2 Indians in each of them.” Ordway writes that “our officers purchased a large Sturgeon” — crediting the transaction to Lewis and Clark specifically. The captains themselves fold the purchase into a generalized observation about trade: “we purchased as maney as we wished on very moderate terms; they Seamed perfectly Satisfied with the exchange and behaved themselves in a very orderly manner.” The single fish in Gass’s canoe becomes, in the captains’ telling, evidence of a regulated commercial relationship.
Clark’s geographical speculation about the Cowlitz — that it “Waters the Country lying west of a range of Mountains which passes the Columbia between the Great falls and rapids” — is reproduced almost identically by Lewis and ignored entirely by the sergeants. This is the characteristic division of labor on the return voyage: the captains construct the ethnographic and cartographic record for eventual publication, while Gass and Ordway maintain the daily ledger of miles, weather, hunters dispatched, and camps made. Read together, the four entries reconstruct a fuller day than any one provides alone — the Skillute hospitality, the rain that prevented pitching the canoes, the Kalama camp, and the captains’ growing confidence in their map of the Lower Columbia drainage.
