The expedition’s progress on October 29, 1805 — moving downriver below the Cascades among densely populated Chinookan villages — produced three journal entries that cover identical ground but diverge sharply in what each narrator considered worth preserving. Clark fills nearly a full folio with ethnographic detail, place-names, and intelligence gathered from Indigenous informants. Ordway condenses the same day to a paragraph organized around mileage and dog purchases. Gass, characteristically, surveys the landscape as a carpenter and hunter would, noting timber species and game.
Three Counts of Dogs, Three Counts of Miles
The most concrete cross-narrator discrepancy is quantitative. Ordway reports the day’s distance as twenty-six miles; Gass logs twenty-three. Both men are typically careful with such figures, and the divergence likely reflects independent estimation rather than copying — a useful indicator that on this date the sergeants were not collating their notes. Clark, who often supplies the authoritative course-and-distance table, instead breaks his entry into segments (“about 5 miles,” “4 miles further,” “3 miles on this Course”) that sum closer to Gass’s figure.
Dog purchases also vary in the telling. Clark itemizes the transactions precisely: twelve dogs and four sacks of pounded fish at the upper village, four more at the eleven-house village, three at the evening camp — nineteen dogs in all. Ordway notes only that the party “bought a number more dogs” at one stop and “several more dogs” at another. Gass mentions a single purchase. The pattern is consistent across the journals of this period: Clark, who handled trade negotiations, tracks commerce as administrative record; the sergeants treat it as routine.
What Each Narrator Sees
The same stretch of river yields three different landscapes. Ordway is drawn to the spectacular and the singular — a waterfall he measures by eye:
Saw a beautiful Spring on the Lard Side, which run off a high clift of rocks, and fell of[f] the clift upwards of a hundred feet perpinticular.
Gass registers the same general scene but inventories its useful resources:
There are some small bottoms along the river, with cotton wood on them, and on the banks of the river, some white oak, ash and hazlenut.
(Gass’s entry here actually runs into the following day, October 30, conflating events — a reminder that his published journal was edited from field notes after the fact.) Clark, by contrast, sees neither cataract nor cottonwood as the day’s chief subject. His landscape is human and political:
The Indians are afraid to hunt or be on th Lard Side of this Columbia river for fear of the Snake Ind. who reside on a fork of this river which falls in above the falls
This intelligence — about intertribal tension, about a tributary (the Cataract, today’s Klickitat) reportedly impassable to salmon, about “10 nations” subsisting along it — appears nowhere in Ordway or Gass. Clark alone records it because Clark alone solicited it.
The Captain’s Ethnographic Eye
Clark’s entry is distinguished above all by sustained attention to the people of the “friendly Village.” He notes house dimensions (“25 feet Sqr”), household size (“abt. 8 men, Say 30 inhabitents”), the foods offered (sacacommis berries, hazelnuts, pounded fish, root bread), and the gendered economy of the gift exchange (“we gave to the Women pices of ribon”). He describes robes by species — wolf, deer, elk, wildcat, fox — and pauses on a detail of personal adornment that neither sergeant captures:
orter is much valued by those people they Cew their hair on each Side with it and ware it about the necks with the tail in front
He also records, almost in passing, one of the small social moments that humanize the Corps’s encounters: “they were pleased with musick of th violin.” Ordway, who often noted Cruzatte’s fiddling, is silent on the matter here.
Clark’s place-naming on this date — Sepulchar Island for a rock bearing burials, Cataract River for the falls-laden tributary — also has no echo in the sergeants’ entries. The toponymic authority of the expedition flowed almost entirely through the captains, and Ordway and Gass typically adopted such names only when they had been formally communicated. On October 29, those names were apparently still fresh in Clark’s notebook alone.
Register and Audience
Read together, the three entries illustrate how thoroughly the expedition’s documentary record depended on parallel, non-redundant observation. Ordway writes for a log; Gass writes (or his later editor writes) for a reading public interested in country and resources; Clark writes for Jefferson, for future cartographers, and for the diplomatic and commercial calculations the expedition was meant to enable. The friendly village below the Cascades survives in the archive in three different shapes because three men were, in effect, keeping three different books.
