The journal entries for September 24, 1805 capture the Corps of Discovery in a moment of acute physical crisis as it descended from the Bitterroots toward the Clearwater and the Nez Perce villages. Three narrators — William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass — record the same march, but each filters the day through a distinctive professional lens. Read together, the entries reveal how rank, role, and habits of attention shaped what each man chose to preserve.
Clark’s Clinical Register
Clark, writing as co-commander and de facto physician, organizes the day around bodies in distress. His shorter field note and his fuller entry both foreground sickness over scenery:
Capt Lewis Sick all Complain of a Lax & heaviness at the Stomack, I gave rushes Pills to Several hot day maney Indians & thier gangues of horses follow us
The expanded version sharpens the picture: “Capt Lewis Scercely able to ride on a jentle horse which was furnishd by the Chief, Several men So unwell that they were Compelled to lie on the Side of the road for Some time others obliged to be put on horses.” Clark’s prose is triage prose. He counts the sick (“8 or 9 men”), names the symptoms, names the remedy (Rush’s pills, the mercurial purgative supplied by Dr. Benjamin Rush in Philadelphia), and registers that even Lewis required a borrowed horse from Twisted Hair. The Nez Perce villages and the camas plain that loom large in Ordway’s account are, for Clark, simply the backdrop to a medical emergency.
Ordway’s Agricultural Eye
Ordway, by contrast, opens with the camas harvest and the prospect of the country. He notices what a New England farm boy turned sergeant would notice:
Saw a number of Squaws digging commass roots in the plain the Soil verry rich and lays delightful for cultivation
Ordway’s entry then ticks through the logistics of the march — loading horses at 8 a.m., one man sent back for two strays, a warm day, “a good road mostly plain but no water,” scattered pine, a descent to a fork of the Columbia, a camp on a prairie island, hunters bringing in four deer and two salmon. He acknowledges sickness only in a glancing clause: “Several men Sick.” Where Clark sees patients, Ordway sees terrain, soil quality, and the day’s commissary. His mention of the salmon, absent from Clark and Gass, is the first signal in this set of entries that the party has reached a Columbia-system fishery.
Gass on Timber, Hunger, and a Wolf
Gass, the carpenter-sergeant, writes the day as a problem of passage and provisions. His attention fixes on the obstacles a man with an axe would weigh:
we were ready to start; and passed along the ridge with a great deal of difficulty and fatigue, our march being much impeded by the fallen timber. A great portion of the timber through which we passed along this ridge is dead, and a considerable part fallen; and our horses are weak and much jaded.
Gass alone records that one of the horses “got into a small swamp, and wet a bale of merchandize” — a detail of cargo damage that neither Clark nor Ordway preserves. He also gives the day’s most vivid food note: “Here we killed a duck and two or three pheasants; and supped upon them and the last of our horse meat. We also killed a wolf and eat it.” That terminal sentence — flat, declarative, almost defiant — is the most candid line in any of the three accounts about how thin the larder had become. Ordway’s hunters bring in deer and salmon; Gass’s hunters “did not join us this evening,” which is why the wolf became supper.
Cross-Narrator Patterns
The three accounts share a small core of facts: a late start while horses were collected, a man (Colter, named only by Clark) sent back for strays, a descent to water, a camp on an island, Indian companions trailing the party. Beyond that core, divergence is striking. Clark and Gass agree that the men were exhausted and ill-fed, but Clark medicalizes the suffering while Gass materializes it through fallen timber and a wolf carcass. Ordway, writing further down the column or perhaps with a steadier stomach, scarcely registers the crisis at all. The Twisted Hair appears by name only in Clark; the camas-digging women appear only in Ordway; the wetted bale of merchandise appears only in Gass. Read singly, each entry gives a partial day. Read together, they reconstruct a Corps that was simultaneously sick, hungry, observant of Nez Perce subsistence, and still keeping a careful inventory of damaged trade goods on the descent toward the Clearwater.
