The expedition’s overland return along the north bank of the Columbia brought the party on April 25, 1806 to a substantial village of the people Lewis and Clark called the Pish-quit-pahs. All four extant journalists for the day — Captains Lewis and Clark and Sergeants Gass and Ordway — recorded the encounter, but the four accounts diverge in revealing ways: in their counts, in their ethnographic ambitions, and in the textual dependencies that bind the captains’ notebooks to one another.
Counting the Village: Numbers, Lodges, and Souls
The most immediately striking discrepancy concerns the size of the village. Gass, writing in his characteristically compressed soldier’s prose, estimates the gathering at roughly five hundred:
we came to a very large band of the Wal-a-waltz nation, the most numerous we had seen on the Columbia; I suppose it consisted of 500 persons, men, women and children
Clark and Lewis, by contrast, both put the population at “about 700 Soles” (Clark) or “about 7 hundred souls” (Lewis). Ordway gives no figure but calls the people “verry numerous.” Gass also misidentifies the band as the “Wal-a-waltz” (Walla Walla), while the captains and Ordway call them Pish-quit-pahs (Ordway’s spelling: “pas-qute-pee”). The lodge count differs slightly even between the captains: Clark records “52 mat Lodges,” Lewis “51 mat lodges” — a small but characteristic divergence between the two officers’ notebooks, which were clearly drafted in close coordination but not mechanically copied.
Parallel Ethnography: The Captains in Tandem
The most extensive ethnographic passages of the day appear in Lewis and Clark, and they are nearly verbatim. Both describe Pishquitpah horsemanship and material culture in matching language. Clark writes:
their bridle is usially a hair rope tied with both ends to the under jaw of the horse, and their Saddles Consist of a pad of dressed Skin Stuffed with goats hair with wooden Sturreps. almost all the horses I have Seen in the poss ession of the Indians have Sore backs.
Lewis’s parallel sentence is identical in substance and nearly so in wording, differing only in spelling (“stirups,” “soar backs”) and minor phrasing. The same is true of the descriptions of women’s dress — short shirts to the knee, long leggings, moccasins, and robes — and the observation that head-flattening is less pronounced among this tribe than among nations farther down the Columbia. The pattern suggests one captain copied the other’s draft, or both worked from a shared field note, with Lewis adding his own reflective coda about the astonishing condition of horses wintered on dry grass and ridden hard.
Clark, however, includes natural-history details that Lewis omits entirely: curlews laying their eggs, the killdeer, a brown lizard, and a marmot (“moonax”) kept as a pet by the Indians. He also notes the cold westerly winds off Mount Hood and the absence of dew. These observations are characteristic of Clark’s broader attentiveness to landscape and fauna on the return journey.
What the Sergeants Saw
Ordway and Gass, writing without the captains’ ethnographic apparatus, preserve details the officers pass over or compress. Ordway alone records a small but telling diplomatic transaction:
one Indian brought back broken glasses which he purchased from us last fall & as they broke he wanted other glass in place &C.
Neither captain mentions this return of defective trade goods, though the encounter would have occurred in their presence. Ordway also alone records that the men entertained the Indians who had followed them: “as they wished to hear the fiddle we played & danced a little to please them.” The fiddle and dancing — recurring instruments of expedition diplomacy — go unremarked in both captains’ journals for this date.
Gass, meanwhile, registers a concern that the officers diplomatically suppress: the physical toll of the march. “The men in general complain of their feet, being sore; and the officers have to go on foot to permit some of them to ride.” Neither Lewis nor Clark mentions sore feet or officers yielding their mounts, though Clark does note in passing that one of the hired Chopunnish horses was taken from Private Hall in the rear of the column — a small theft of which Lewis says nothing.
Registers of Witness
Read together, the four entries illustrate the layered authorship of the expedition record. Lewis and Clark draft a shared ethnographic portrait, with Clark contributing the day’s natural history and Lewis the reflective commentary on Native horsemanship. Ordway preserves the texture of intercultural exchange — broken trade glass, fiddle music — that the captains’ more formal register filters out. Gass, terser still, supplies the soldier’s perspective: how far they marched, how the men’s bodies held up, and where wood could be found for a willow-grove camp.
