The entries of October 21, 1805 capture a single hard day on the Columbia River near Wallula Gap, but the three surviving accounts diverge sharply in detail, register, and observational focus. William Clark’s expansive journal, John Ordway’s workmanlike sergeant’s record, and Patrick Gass’s compressed published narrative together describe roughly thirty-two miles of rocky rapids, several Indian villages, and a recurring problem the captains could not escape: the lack of firewood on the treeless plateau.
The Fuel Problem
Clark opens with a complaint that neither Ordway nor Gass records with the same urgency. He writes that the party
could not Cook brakfast before we embarked as usial for the want of wood or Something to burn.
He elaborates that the previous night’s gathering of dry willows had been "barely Suffient to cook Supper, and not a Sufficency to cook brackfast this morning." This scarcity drives the morning’s first stop. Ordway notes simply that the party "halted at an Indian village where we bought a little wood and cooked breakfast," while Gass — characteristically terse — mentions wood only at day’s end, recording that they "encamped at some Indian lodges, where we procured wood from the natives to cook with." Clark’s repeated dwelling on fuel scarcity, absent from the other two journals, reflects his role as the expedition’s primary logistical chronicler. For the sergeants, the wood was simply purchased; for Clark, the inability to cook a meal without trading for sticks was a circumstance worth recording twice.
What Each Narrator Sees at the Lodges
The morning halt produces three quite different inventories. Ordway catalogs the trade goods and pelts: "a number of fisher and rackoon Skins. Some otter Skins also," along with "a fiew blue cloth blankets." He adds an ethnographic observation absent in the others — that "these Savages gave us any thing we asked them for… as if they were in fear of us." Gass, by contrast, fixes on a single ecological clue:
We saw among them some small robes made of the skins of grey squirrels, some racoon skins, and acorns, which are signs of a timbered coun- try not far distant.
Gass’s inferential turn — reading squirrel pelts and acorns as forest indicators — is distinctive. Clark, working at greater length, confirms the acorns and adds the crucial detail that the local people "inform us they precure them of the nativs who live near the falls below which place they all discribe by the term Timm." Clark also records a striking material trace of prior contact: "two Scarlet and a blue cloth blanket, also a Salors Jacket." Neither sergeant mentions the sailor’s jacket — a detail with real significance for understanding the reach of Pacific maritime trade goods into the interior, and exactly the sort of observation Clark routinely catches that his subordinates do not.
Clark also delivers the day’s only sustained ethnographic description, detailing the men’s short deer or goat-skin robes and the women’s dress "which fall from the neck So as to Cover the front of the body as low as the waste." Ordway gestures at the same subject — "a fiew Elk and Deer Skins dressed with the hair on which they wear for covering" — but without the careful gendered distinction Clark records.
The Rapids and the Register
All three narrators traveled the same rocky water, but their prose registers differ markedly. Ordway describes "bad rockey rapids where the River is nearly filled with high dark couloured rocks the water divided in narrow deep channels, bad whorl pools" — vivid, sensory, and concrete. Gass collapses the same hours into a single clause: the party "passed… through two very rocky rapid parts of the river with great difficulty." The compression here likely reflects the editorial smoothing of Gass’s published 1807 text, where field-level specificity has been pared away.
Clark’s account is by far the most navigationally precise. He logs each rapid by mileage, counts lodges ("5 Lodges a little below on the Stard. Side, and one lodge on an Island"), and records his standing safety procedure: "at all that was verry dangerous put out all who could not Swim to walk around." This sentence — a rare explicit statement of expedition policy — appears in none of the other journals.
The three accounts converge on the same distance (thirty-two miles) and the same camp under high cliffs, but they diverge in what each narrator considered worth preserving. Ordway watches the trade; Gass infers the ecology; Clark counts the rocks, the lodges, and the threads of a sailor’s jacket that had traveled, somehow, from the Pacific to a lodge on the middle Columbia.
