March 24, 1806 marks the expedition’s first full day ascending the Columbia after the departure from Fort Clatsop. All four journalists — Patrick Gass, John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis — describe the same sequence of events: an early morning party retrieving elk meat, a mid-day stop at a Cathlahmah village, and an evening camp at an abandoned village opposite the lower Wahkiakum settlement. Yet what each man elects to record reveals as much about the narrator as about the day.
Parallel Reports, Divergent Detail
Ordway and Clark produce nearly identical accounts of the day’s movements, a pattern consistent with Ordway’s habit of working in close orbit to the captains’ notes. Both record the 9:30 A.M. departure, the 1:00 P.M. arrival at the Cathlahmah village, the layover until 3:30, and the passage through the narrow channels between the Seal Islands. Both reach for the same striking phrase about the village. Ordway writes that it is
the dirtiest & Stinkenest place I ever Saw.
Clark expands the same judgment with characteristic moralism, declaring the village
the dirtiest and Stinkingest place I ever Saw in any Shape whatever, and the inhabitants partake of the carrestick of the Village.
The verbal echo is too close to be coincidence — one journal almost certainly drew on the other, or both drew on a shared verbal exchange in camp. Both men also note the canoe burial scaffolds visible a short distance below their evening encampment, and both record the two Indians who arrived after dark speaking English words learned from coastal traders and sailors.
Gass, by contrast, offers the briefest entry of the four. Because the tide had stranded his canoe, he experienced the morning differently from his companions:
The hunters went on in the small canoe ahead, and I had to wait for the rising of the tide. In about two hours I was able to follow the other canoes, and proceeded on about 12 miles to a village of the Cath-la-mas where the rest of the party had halted.
Gass’s twelve miles, Clark’s sixteen, and Lewis’s fifteen reflect the different vantage points from which each man estimated the day’s progress — Gass from a delayed catch-up, the captains from the lead canoes.
What Lewis and Clark Each Notice Alone
The most revealing divergences appear between the two captains. Clark devotes the analytical center of his entry to a piece of ethnographic correction. Examining two large Cathlahmah canoes inlaid with material the Natives identified as the teeth of slain enemies, Clark conducts a closer inspection:
in examineing of them Closely haveing taken out Several pices, we found that were Sea Shells which yet contained a part of the iner ____ … Capt Cook may have mistaken those Shills verry well for humane teeth without a Close examination.
This is Clark engaging directly with the published record of Pacific exploration, gently correcting Captain James Cook on a point of material culture. Neither Ordway nor Gass mentions the canoes or the shells. Lewis omits the episode entirely.
Lewis, meanwhile, records observations none of the other three journalists captures. He alone notes the seasonal return of a small red-headed woodpecker, the conspicuous absence of swans, white brant, and small geese, and a detailed appreciation of Cathlahmah architectural carving:
these people are very fond of sculpture in wood of which they exhibit a variety of specemines about their houses. the broad peices supporting the center of the roof and those through which the doors are cut, seem to be the peices on which they most display their taist. I saw some of these which represented human figures setting and supporting the burthen on their sholders.
Lewis also alone records a small diplomatic transaction: a Cathlahmah man pursued the party to point out that they had taken the wrong channel, and then claimed the small canoe the expedition had appropriated from the Clatsops. Lewis directed that an elk skin be given in exchange — a quiet acknowledgment of property that neither captain dwelt upon, and which the other journals pass over in silence.
Register and Role
The day’s four entries together illustrate the stratified labor of the expedition’s record. Gass, the working sergeant, files a logistics-driven summary. Ordway tracks distances, times, and the most quotable camp judgments. Clark plays the comparativist, weighing what he sees against prior European reports. Lewis, the natural historian and ethnographer, lingers on woodpeckers, waterfowl, carved house posts, and the etiquette of a returned canoe. Read singly, each entry is partial; read together, they reconstruct a fuller March day on the lower Columbia than any one narrator preserved alone.
This analysis was AI-assisted and reviewed by a human editor prior to publication.
