The entries dated October 20, 1805 reveal sharp differences in observational range, ethnographic curiosity, and even calendrical reliability among the expedition’s diarists. William Clark, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway were all moving down the Columbia near Wallula Gap, but their records for this Sunday diverge in ways that illuminate how the expedition’s documentary record was actually constructed.
Clark’s Ethnographic Eye
Clark’s entry — preserved in two overlapping drafts — is by far the most expansive of the three. He opens with a diplomatic scene at the morning camp: roughly 100 Indians arriving to visit, a council smoke, and a breakfast of dog flesh shared with about 200 to 350 onlookers. He notes dress with characteristic precision, recording that some men wore “scarlet & blue cloth robes” and one “a Salors jacket” — small details that tracked the diffusion of trade goods inland from the coast.
The set piece of Clark’s day, however, is the burial vault he encountered on an island below camp. His description is unusual among expedition writings for its sustained ethnographic attention:
the Vaut was made by broad poads and pieces of Canoes leaning on a ridge pole which was Suported by 2 forks Set in the ground Six feet in hight in an easterly and westerly direction and about 60 feet in length, and 12 feet wide, in it I observed great numbers of humane bones of every description perticularly in a pile near the Center of the vault, on the East End 21 Scul bomes forming a circle on Mats
Clark distinguishes between older remains — the central pile and the ring of skulls — and “those of more resent death,” wrapped in leather robes on boards. He inventories the grave goods (“fishing nets of various kinds, Baskets of different Sizes, wooden boles, robes Skins, trenchers”) and notes the skeletons of horses around the structure. This is the kind of cultural detail that no other expedition narrator records for this date.
Gass: A Practical Register
Patrick Gass, writing in the plainer prose that distinguishes his published narrative, registers the same stretch of river but filters it through a soldier-carpenter’s concerns. He notes the natural scene — pelicans, gulls, and the spawned-out salmon that line the banks — and explains the phenomenon to readers: “Vast quantities of these fish die at this time of the year.” Like Clark, he stops at an island camp at noon and trades for provisions, and like Clark he is alert to evidence of Euro-American contact, observing that the inhabitants possessed “a hempen seine and some ash paddles which they did not make themselves.”
But where Clark lingers over a vault, Gass closes the day with a practical complaint that Clark omits entirely:
We could not get one single stick of wood to cook with; and had only a few small green willows.
Gass also remarks that the party encamped “without any of the natives being along, which is unusual on this river” — a small ethnographic observation in its own right, and one that quietly confirms the dense Indigenous presence Clark describes earlier in the same day.
Ordway’s Misdated Page
The Ordway entry filed under this date does not, in fact, describe October 20, 1805. Ordway writes of rain and of “finishing our huts to make ourselves comfortable” — and his own dateline reads “Saturday 21st Decr 1805,” placing the entry at Fort Clatsop two months later. The misalignment is a useful reminder that the expedition’s manuscript record contains slips of dating, copying, and transcription that modern editors must reconcile.
Compared on October 20 itself, then, only Clark and Gass are genuinely in dialogue. Their accounts confirm one another on the broad outline of the day — the river’s treelessness, the pelicans, the island fishing camps — but diverge in register. Gass writes for a future reader who needs to understand a spawning cycle and the difficulty of cooking without wood; Clark writes as a captain compiling intelligence on the peoples whose territory the expedition was crossing. Read together, the two journals demonstrate the complementary documentary functions that made the expedition’s collective record richer than any single narrator’s voice.
This analysis was AI-assisted and reviewed by a human editor prior to publication.
