The entries of John Ordway, Patrick Gass, and William Clark for October 25, 1805 describe the same harrowing morning: the Corps of Discovery’s decision to run their canoes through the Short Narrows below Celilo Falls rather than attempt a full portage. All three narrators confirm the same sequence — baggage carried overland, canoes lined down one at a time, one canoe filling with water, a near-collision with rock two miles below, and an evening camp at the mouth of a creek on the larboard (south) side. Yet the three accounts differ markedly in register, in what each observer noticed, and in how each understood the day’s tension.
The Run Through the Gut
Clark, as the officer who personally directed the operation, gives the fullest procedural account. He explains that he and Lewis first walked down to inspect what the Indians had identified as the worst stretch, judged a full portage impractical with the large canoes, and then divided the party — some to take canoes through, others to carry the most valuable stores across a one-mile portage. Clark stationed himself with men holding ropes:
I had fixed on the Chanel with roapes to throw out to any who Should unfortunately meet with difficuelty in passing through; great number of Indians viewing us from the high rocks under which we had to pass
His description of the channel itself is the most vivid of the three:
This Chanel is through a hard rough black rock, from 50-100 yards wide. Swelling and boiling in a most tremendious maner
Clark twice records his emotional relief — the third canoe came safely to shore, and after the last passed he
felt my Self extreamly gratified and pleased
.
Ordway, writing from the ranks, compresses the operation but supplies a striking detail Clark omits: a measurement of the river’s flood range.
the River between these narrows and the great falls rises at high water 48 feet perpenticular by its being confined by the different narrows
Whether Ordway obtained this figure from the captains or from observation of high-water marks on the rock, he is the only narrator on this date to preserve it. Gass, characteristically the most economical of the three, reduces the entire affair to a sentence: the canoes were taken over one at a time, one filled with water, and the party was
detained three hours
— a duration neither Clark nor Ordway specifies.
Indians Viewing, Indians Threatening
The three narrators diverge most sharply in their treatment of the Native peoples encountered. Clark frames the day in defensive terms: the party deliberately camped on
a high Point of rocks to defend our Selves in Case the threts of those Indians below Should be put in execution against us
. Gass corroborates the atmosphere of unease but attributes the warning to local people rather than to downstream enemies:
The natives about here are, or pretend to be, very uneasy, and say the Indians below will kill us
. Gass’s skeptical aside — or pretend to be — is absent from both other accounts and suggests he doubted the sincerity of the alarm.
Ordway alone records the social texture of the parting from the expedition’s two Nez Perce chief-guides. He notes that the chiefs explained there was a nation below with whom they were at war, did not wish to continue, and were formally
settled with
before turning home. Ordway also describes a war party that had just swum the river with horses and shared bear’s oil, venison, and fresh fish. Clark mentions only meeting
a 2d Chief of the nation from hunting
and giving him a small medal. Gass omits both encounters entirely, instead noting the six great scaffolds the local people used for drying salmon for trade — a commercial detail neither captain records here.
Patterns of Observation
The day’s three accounts illustrate a recurring division of labor in the expedition’s documentary record. Clark supplies the operational narrative and the geographic measurement of the creek (twenty yards wide, heading toward the snow mountain to the southwest), along with the evening’s hunt — a small deer, a goose, and a hearty supper. Ordway, often working from shared camp talk, captures particulars the captains pass over: the hydraulic figure of forty-eight feet, the war party’s gifts, the diplomatic dismissal of the chiefs. Gass, writing for an eventual reading public, distills the day to its essentials and adds the ethnographic observation of the salmon scaffolds.
Where all three converge — the filled canoe, the camp at the creek mouth on the larboard side, the timbered hills of oak and pine — the agreement is strong evidence of shared experience rather than copying; the wording differs in each. Where they diverge, each narrator preserves something the others lost.
