The entries dated October 2, 1805 by William Clark, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway present an unusually instructive cross-narrator puzzle. Two of the three accounts describe the Corps’ miserable layover at Canoe Camp on the Clearwater River, where the men were burning out log canoes and reduced to eating roots and horseflesh. The third — Ordway’s — describes a wholly different landscape on the lower Columbia. Read together, the three texts reveal both the daily texture of the expedition’s hungriest week and the editorial complications that haunt the journals as documentary sources.
Clark and Gass: Convergent Hunger
Clark’s two drafts of the October 2 entry agree on the essentials: provisions exhausted, a small prairie wolf the only kill, and the decision to slaughter a horse. He writes plainly that the party had “nothing to eate but roots, which give the men violent pains in their bowels after eating much of them,” and that the situation “Compells us to kill one of our horses to eate and make Suep for the Sick men.” Clark also records small acts of diplomacy that Gass omits — dividing his handkerchief among five visiting Indians and presenting rings and brooches to two principal men.
Gass, writing from the same camp, confirms the food crisis from the enlisted men’s perspective:
We caught some small fish to-day, and our hunters killed 5 prairie fowls. These were all we had to subsist on.
Note the discrepancy in the hunters’ tally. Clark mentions only the prairie wolf; Gass credits the hunters with five prairie fowl in addition to small fish. Such small disagreements are characteristic — Gass, a sergeant working alongside the hunting parties, often catches game counts the captains overlook or aggregate differently. Gass also gives a topographical reading absent from Clark’s entry, describing the Clearwater as “so confined by the mountains that it is not more than 20 yards wide,” with mountains “not less than 1000 feet high.”
Most importantly, Gass alone narrates the return of Clark’s reconnaissance party — a passage that contradicts Clark’s own entry, which places Clark on the hills hunting. Gass writes that “At 1 o’clock Captain Clarke and his party returned, after having been down the river about 12 miles,” and reports that the guide proposed an alternate route “by going up the south fork of this river.” Gass then describes the dispatch of a letter to Lewis and a retreat upriver of three miles to a supperless camp. None of this appears in Clark’s October 2 entries, suggesting either that Gass has conflated events from an adjacent day or that Clark’s two drafts compress activities Gass distributes differently. The Gass account, published in 1807 and heavily edited by David McKeehan, is known to take such liberties with chronology.
The Ordway Anomaly
Ordway’s entry under the same date belongs, on internal evidence, to a wholly different point in the journey. He describes running the canoes through “the last bad rapid,” passing “Strabery Island,” trading with Indians who possess “red and blue cloath blankets” and a “brass musket,” and camping “under a verry Shelving clift.” The editorial footnotes embedded in the source identify these landmarks as the Cascades of the Columbia and Wind River in present-day Skamania County, Washington — locations the Corps did not reach until late October and early November 1805.
about 12 we set out passed a large Island mostly prarie which our officers name Strabery Island, we halted a fiew minutes and killed Several geese.
The mismatch is almost certainly a transcription or pagination error in the printed Ordway journal rather than evidence that Ordway was somehow detached from the main party. On October 2, 1805, Ordway was at Canoe Camp with Clark and Gass; the entry catalogued here under that date describes events from approximately October 30. Researchers using the Ordway text must therefore cross-check dates against Clark and Gass before drawing chronological conclusions.
Register and Reliability
Even setting the Ordway problem aside, the two reliable October 2 entries demonstrate the value of reading narrators against one another. Clark’s voice is administrative and diplomatic, tracking gifts, dispatches, and the medical rationale for killing a horse. Gass’s voice is topographical and corporeal, attentive to cliff heights, game counts, and the bodily fact of going “supperless” to rest. Neither alone gives the full day; together — and once the misdated Ordway passage is set aside — they sketch a Corps suspended between the exhausted Bitterroots behind them and the unrun Clearwater rapids ahead, eating horse soup and waiting for Lewis.
