The entries for 25 September 1805 capture a pivotal moment as the Corps of Discovery, freshly descended from the Bitterroots, prepared to abandon their horses for water travel. William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass each record the day from different vantage points — Clark in the field hunting canoe timber, Ordway at the island camp on the Clearwater, and Gass writing in a more retrospective, summarizing register. Read together, the three accounts illustrate how labor, illness, and Indigenous assistance shaped the expedition’s transition from overland to riverine travel.
Clark’s Reconnaissance and the Forks of the Clearwater
Clark’s field notes are the most precise. He logs his bearings — “N 70° W 2 miles S. 75°W 2 miles” — and identifies a tributary entering from the north of roughly equal volume. His expanded entry adds ethnographic and practical detail: a Nez Perce companion took up his “guilt” (gig) and speared six salmon, two of which were roasted on the spot, and two Indigenous canoes loaded with the household goods of two families passed by:
those Canoes are long Stedy and without much rake … one of the Indian Canoes with 2 men with Poles Set out from the forks at the Same time I did and arrived at our Camp on the Island within 15 minits of the Same time I did, not withstanding 3 rapids which they had to draw the Canoe thro in the distance
This is a working captain’s observation — Clark is sizing up Nez Perce watercraft as a model for what his own party must build, noting their stability, low rake, and speed even against rapids. Ordway, by contrast, registers only the bare result: that Clark “had been 4 or 5 miles down to a fork of the River … [and] Saw Some pitch pine timber which he thought would answer for canoes.” Ordway’s distance estimate (4–5 miles) closely tracks Clark’s logged 4 miles to the forks, suggesting Ordway received his information directly from Clark on his return to camp.
The Outbreak of Sickness
Clark alone records the medical crisis with any specificity. “3 parts of Party Sick Capt Lewis verry Sick hot day,” he notes in the field, expanding in his journal that “most of the Party Complaining” and that on returning to camp he “gave Some Salts & Tarter emetic.” The combination of rich camas roots, dried salmon, and exhausting mountain crossing had laid the corps low. Ordway — himself apparently still functional — passes over the illness in silence, mentioning only routine matters: hunting, the native fishery, and the return of the man who had retrieved his horse by “hireing Indians to git him.” That detail, absent from Clark and Gass, is characteristic of Ordway’s attention to small transactional moments within the party.
Gass’s Compressed and Displaced Narrative
Gass’s entry presents an editorial puzzle. As published, it conflates events from the descent out of the Bitterroots with the canoe-camp period, describing the party meeting a hunter on a ridge, descending into “a fine large valley, clear of these dismal and horrible mountains,” and being received by the Nez Perce. He refers to Clark’s reconnaissance in the past tense:
Capt. Clarke met us here: he had been over at the river, and found the distance 18 miles and a good road from this place. He thinks we will be able to take the water again at the place he had been at
The 18-mile figure and the reference to five hunters left at the river clearly belong to events of 22–24 September, not the 25th. This temporal compression reflects the well-known editorial reworking of Gass’s manuscript by David McKeehan for the 1807 publication, which smoothed Gass’s terse field entries into more polished retrospective prose. Where Clark and Ordway record a single day’s activity, Gass’s entry reads as a summary spanning the arrival at the Nez Perce villages.
Gass also offers the day’s sole sustained ethnographic note — that the camas roots “are made into a kind of bread; which is good and nourishing, and tastes like that sometimes made of pumpkins” — a comparison neither Clark nor Ordway draws. Whether the simile originates with Gass or McKeehan is uncertain, but it exemplifies the published Journal‘s tendency to translate expedition experience into terms accessible to an Eastern reading public. Across the three accounts, the same day yields a captain’s technical survey, a sergeant’s camp ledger, and a carpenter’s published memoir — three registers that together recover what no single narrator captures alone.
