By the third of October 1805, the Corps of Discovery had been encamped on the Clearwater River for several days, hollowing out cottonwood canoes for the descent toward the Pacific. The journal entries from this date are brief, but read together they reveal how three different narrators framed the same twenty-four hours according to their respective concerns and habits of attention.
Clark’s Ledger of Health and Labor
William Clark, as so often during the Canoe Camp interval, opens with weather and the condition of the party. His entry is almost telegraphic:
October 3rd Thursday 1805 Canoe Camp a fair cool morning wind from the East all our men getting well and at work at the canoes &c.
A second, slightly expanded version of the same entry adds that the visiting Indians from below — likely the Nez Perce party that had been camped nearby — "Set out on their return early," while "Several others Came from different directions." Clark’s doubled entry is characteristic of his practice of revising field notes into a fuller fair copy. Both versions emphasize two intertwined priorities: the men "getting better in helth," and their return to productive labor on the canoes. After the gastric distress that had laid much of the party low following their first meals of camas root and salmon, recovery and work were inseparable concerns for the captain.
Ordway’s Hunters and Gass’s Salmon
Sergeant John Ordway, writing from the same camp, ignores the weather and the captains’ health bulletin entirely. His attention is on the hunting parties:
men returned with the meat. 2 hunters Stayed out a hunting a number of Indians came in a Canoe to our Camp, in the evening the two hunters returned had killed Six Elk about 5 miles dis- tance from this place.
Ordway’s entry is fragmentary at its opening — clearly continuing a thought from the previous day’s hunting dispatch — but it captures a detail Clark omits: six elk taken five miles off, a substantial supply for a party still wary of fish and roots. Ordway also notes the canoe-borne Indian visitors that Clark mentions only in passing, framing the encounter as an event in itself rather than as background to the work of the camp.
Patrick Gass, whose surviving fragment for the day is only a single line, contributes a third angle:
passed the Indian camp, where they gave us a little dried sal-
The sentence breaks off mid-word — almost certainly "salmon" — but the detail it preserves is one neither Clark nor Ordway records: a small, neighborly transaction with the nearby Nez Perce. Gass, the carpenter-sergeant, repeatedly notices these everyday exchanges of food and courtesy that the captains tend to abstract into summary phrases like "Indians came" or "Indians went."
Three Registers, One Day
The contrast in register is instructive. Clark writes as a commander accountable for the party’s condition and progress; his entry is a status report. Ordway, the senior sergeant, writes as a logistician tracking men, meat, and movement. Gass, working from a more anecdotal impulse, preserves the small social texture of camp life — a handful of dried fish offered in passing.
There is no evidence here of one narrator copying another. Ordway and Gass do not echo Clark’s weather note, and Clark does not mention the elk that Ordway treats as the day’s principal event. The three accounts are genuinely independent, each shaped by the writer’s role in the expedition’s hierarchy and by his habits of observation. Taken together, they reconstruct a fuller picture of October 3rd than any single journal provides: a cool, east-wind morning at Canoe Camp; sick men returning to the adzes and fire-hollowing of the cottonwoods; hunters bringing in elk from the hills; Nez Perce visitors arriving and departing by canoe; and, somewhere in the margins, a small gift of salmon that only Gass thought worth recording.
