The entries of Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark for October 18, 1805, document a single morning at the confluence of the Columbia and the river they call the Ki-moo-e-nim (the Snake), followed by an afternoon’s descent down the Columbia. The three accounts share a common spine — Lewis taking a noon observation, Clark measuring the rivers, the council with local chiefs, the mid-afternoon departure — but the narrators diverge sharply in what they choose to record and in how much technical detail each can muster.
The Same Morning, Three Registers
Clark’s entry is the documentary core from which the enlisted men appear to draw. He alone records the precise altitude observation (“Took one altitude of the Suns upper Limb 28° 22′ 15″”), the survey bearings used to triangulate the river widths, and the diplomatic transactions of the council. He notes that he “made a Second Chief by giveing a meadel & wampom” and gave “a String of wampom to the old Chief.” Neither Gass nor Ordway mentions the medal ceremony at all — a striking omission given its importance to the captains’ Indian policy.
Ordway, writing in the practical register of a sergeant, compresses Clark’s survey work into a single clean sentence:
Capt Clark measured Colum-bian River and the kimoenem Rivers and found the Columbia River to be 860 yards wide, and the kimooenem R. to be 475 [575] yards wide at the forks.
Ordway’s “860 yards” for the Columbia disagrees with Clark’s own figure of “960¾ yds water,” suggesting Ordway either misheard or transcribed from an earlier estimate before Clark’s final calculation. His Snake River figure of 475 has been editorially corrected to 575, matching Clark. The discrepancy is a useful reminder that the enlisted journals, though often parallel to the captains’, are not simply copies.
Gass, by contrast, foregrounds ethnography. Where Ordway reports the linguistic work in a single line — “our officers compared several of the natives languages and found these to be of the flat head nation but another tribe” — Gass elaborates on what Lewis was actually doing and pivots to the condition of the people themselves:
our Commanding Officers were employed in getting specimens of the language of the natives, there being three, or part of three, different nations here. They are almost without clothing, having no covering of any account, except some deer skin robes and a few leggins of the same materials. The women have scarce sufficient to cover their nakedness.
Clark confirms the linguistic project — “Capt Lewis took a vocabillary of the So kulk or Pierced noses Language and Chim-na-pum Language” — and names the nations with a precision Gass lacks. But Clark says nothing about clothing. The observation is Gass’s alone.
Details Each Narrator Notices Alone
Each journal preserves something the others miss. Clark opens with a hunting note: “Several Heath hens or large Pheasents lit near us & the men killed Six of them.” Ordway omits the birds entirely. Gass omits them as well, though his published text — heavily edited by David McKeehan — interpolates a long footnote comparing the Columbia to Mackenzie’s River of the West, material that almost certainly originated with the editor rather than with Gass at the campfire.
Ordway alone records the river’s biological texture during the afternoon’s descent: “we Saw a great many dead Sammon floating in the River, and Saw the living jumping verry thick.” Clark notices the dead fish only obliquely, as a commercial problem — “The fish being very bad those which was offerd to us we had every reason to believe was taken up on the Shore dead, we thought proper not to purchase any” — and turns instead to the purchase of “forty dogs” with beads, bells, and thimbles. Gass mentions neither the dead salmon nor the dog purchase, ending his day’s entry simply with “thirty canoes; and a great quantity of dried fish” at the camp opposite their own.
Clark also preserves a piece of cartographic intelligence absent from the other journals: “The Great Chief Cuts-Sa.h nim gave me a Sketch of the rivers & Tribes above on the great river & its waters on which he put great numbers of villages of his nation & friends.” This Indigenous map — drawn by a Sokulk leader and copied into Clark’s notes — represents one of the entry’s most consequential geographic encounters, and it survives only because Clark recorded it.
Patterns of Dependence and Independence
Read together, the three entries display the layered information economy of the expedition. Clark generates the technical record: bearings, latitudes, ethnonyms, diplomatic gifts, the chief’s sketch map. Ordway works in parallel from his own field notes but checks his numbers against the captains’, sometimes imperfectly. Gass, whose published journal was reworked by McKeehan in 1807, retains the texture of lived observation — clothing, shyness of the natives, the count of canoes — while losing some of the precision the sergeants’ journals preserve. The contrast on October 18 is not a matter of accuracy versus error, but of complementary attention: the same day at Wallula Gap looks measurably different depending on whose pen one follows.
