April 11, 1806 found the Corps of Discovery struggling upstream against one of the Columbia’s most formidable obstacles: the Cascades, which the men called the “Grand Shoot” or “big Shoote.” Two sergeants—Patrick Gass and John Ordway—left journal entries for this day, and reading them side by side reveals how differently two enlisted chroniclers could render the same wet, exhausting hours of labor.
The Same Day, Two Registers
Gass is characteristically terse. His entry compresses the morning’s work into a few clipped clauses, noting only that the men “who were able set out to take the canoes through the grand shoot,” that “About 1 o’clock we got two over,” and that two more followed “after great toil and danger.” Gass favors the summary verb and the round hour. He gives us the shape of the day but few of its textures.
Ordway, by contrast, lingers. Where Gass writes “great toil and danger,” Ordway shows us what that danger looked like:
all the party except a fiew to guard the baggage turned out with Capt Clark to takeing up our canoes with the tow Rope up the big Shoote took one large one and one small one at once the large one filled at the highest pitch where it is allmost perpinticular but with some difficulty we got the 2 to the head of the portage about noon
Ordway names the technique (the “tow Rope”), the officer in charge (Captain Clark), the worst spot (“the highest pitch where it is allmost perpinticular”), and the consequence (the canoe “filled” with water). He then continues with a second round of hauling after dinner, during which “this large canoe filled twice with water at the worst pitch.” The smallest canoe, he notes, was “taken & carried by land”—a detail Gass omits entirely.
What Each Sergeant Notices
The divergence is not merely stylistic. Ordway records information Gass either did not know or did not bother to set down. Only Ordway tells us that Clark personally led the hauling party while a small detachment guarded the baggage. Only Ordway preserves the labor economy of the day: two canoes before noon, a return for dinner, two more canoes in the afternoon, with the smallest portaged overland. And only Ordway credits the help received “by the assistance of a number of Indians at the worst pitch”—a significant detail, given that this same stretch of river would soon be the site of considerable friction between the Corps and the local Native peoples.
Gass, for his part, contributes one piece of information Ordway does not: “3 hunters went on ahead in the least.” The phrase is garbled—likely a transcription artifact for something like “in the [interim]” or a reference to the smaller canoe—but it points to the dispersal of the party that Ordway, focused on the canoes themselves, does not record.
Sergeant Prose and the Shape of a Day
The two entries together demonstrate why scholars value having multiple enlisted journals for the same date. Gass’s brevity gives a chronological skeleton; Ordway’s more granular prose supplies the muscle. Gass writes as though summarizing for a future reader who needs the gist; Ordway writes as though working through the day in his own memory, pitch by pitch, canoe by canoe. Both men were sergeants, both were literate but not formally educated—Ordway’s “perpinticular” and “allmost” sit alongside Gass’s cleaner orthography—and yet their habits of attention diverge sharply.
Notably, neither sergeant mentions the theft of Lewis’s dog Seaman, an episode often associated with this stretch of the return journey near the Cascades. Ordway’s surviving account of Lewis’s fury at that incident belongs to a different entry; on April 11 his attention is wholly absorbed by ropes, pitches, and water-filled canoes. The Cascades, on this day, were antagonist enough.
