April 19, 1806 finds the returning expedition divided in purpose. Above the Long Narrows of the Columbia, the men spend the day hauling baggage and small canoes the two miles of portage past the Skillute village, while William Clark presses upriver to the Eneeshur villages at the Great Falls in search of more horses. The day’s four journals — by Patrick Gass, John Ordway, Meriwether Lewis, and Clark himself — together record a transition the captains had clearly resolved upon: abandoning the river for an overland march.
Labor on the Portage and the Fate of the Large Canoes
The enlisted journalists Gass and Ordway focus tightly on the work itself. Gass measures the portage and tallies the horses acquired, noting that the two large canoes were broken up:
we got all our baggage and canoes across except the two large ones, of which we made firewood.
Ordway corroborates this and adds an economic detail the captains omit — that even the firewood had to be carried past the portage, because the Indians at the village priced fuel high:
carried our firewood past the portage also as it is so hard [to procure] about the village that the Savages value it high.
Lewis, by contrast, frames the same labor administratively (“employed all hands in transporting our baggage on their backs and by means of the four pack horses”) and then turns to ethnographic observation. The contrast in register is characteristic: Gass and Ordway record what the men did and what things cost, while Lewis records what the captains saw and what it meant.
The Salmon Ceremony — A Lewis Observation, Copied by Clark
The most striking ethnographic passage of the day appears almost verbatim in both Lewis’s and Clark’s entries. Lewis writes:
there was great joy with the natives last night in consequence of the arrival of the salmon; one of those fish was caught; this was the harbinger of good news to them… this fish was dressed and being divided into small peices was given to each child in the village. this custom is founded in a supersticious opinon that it will hasten the arrival of the salmon.
Clark’s entry repeats the passage with only minor orthographic differences (“harbenger,” “Supersticious”). The shared language confirms what scholars have long recognized about the 1806 journals: Clark frequently transcribed Lewis’s observations into his own book, particularly for ethnographic and natural-historical material recorded while the two were physically separated. Since Clark left for the Eneeshur village at 5:30 P.M., he could not have personally witnessed the previous night’s ceremony at Skillute; the passage is Lewis’s, lent to Clark’s record. Neither Gass nor Ordway mentions the first-salmon rite at all — a reminder that the captains’ journals preserve cultural detail the sergeants’ do not.
Horses, Kettles, and the Provoking Night
All four narrators agree that horses were the day’s currency, but they disagree on the count and emphasis. Gass reports “Five more horses” obtained in the day; Ordway credits Clark with “3 or 4”; Clark himself specifies four at the village plus one purchased by Lewis at the basin, for a total of five. Lewis records only “four other horses” obtained, but adds the painful detail of the price:
we wer obliged to dispence with two of our kettles in order to acquire those. we have now only one small kettle to a mess of 8 men.
Clark copies this kettle passage nearly word for word, again indicating shared composition. Lewis alone, however, records the night’s troubles in camp — Willard’s negligence with a stray horse, the captain’s unusual sharpness in reprimand, and the “stone horse” stallions throwing themselves against their picket ropes:
I repremanded him more severely for this peice of negligence than had been usual with me… they were extreemly wrestless and it required the attention of the whole guard through the night to retain them notwithstanding they were bubbled and picquted.
This is Lewis at his most personally exposed — admitting both his irritation and its excess. Clark, writing from the Eneeshur village eight miles upriver, knows nothing of the incident and does not record it. Gass and Ordway, present at the camp, also pass it over in silence, whether from discretion or from a sergeant’s instinct not to chronicle officers’ tempers.
Patterns Across the Four Pens
The April 19 entries illustrate three persistent features of the expedition’s documentary record: the captains’ shared text on ethnographic and logistical summaries (the salmon ceremony, the kettles); the enlisted journalists’ attentiveness to commercial and material specifics the captains overlook (the priced firewood, the broken-up canoes); and Lewis’s tendency, when writing alone, to admit emotional texture — provocation, severity, sleeplessness — that vanishes the moment Clark resumes his role as co-author of the official narrative.
