The encampment near the mouth of the Washougal produced one of the most striking convergences of the return journey: a planning entry shared almost verbatim by the two captains, a logistical summary by Ordway, and a brief hunter’s report from Gass. Read together, the four entries show how information moved through the expedition’s hierarchy and how a major geographical discovery — the Multnomah (Willamette) River — entered the official record.
A Shared Resolution, Two Hands
Lewis and Clark open their entries with nearly identical language, a pattern common when the captains coordinated their journals. Lewis writes:
This morning we came to a resolution to remain at our present encampment or some where in this neighbourhood untill we had obtained as much dryed meat as would be necessary for our voyage as far as the Chopunnish.
Clark’s version differs only in spelling and one substantive detail: where Lewis writes of exchanging “our perogues for canoes,” Clark writes “our large Canoes for Small ones,” and where Lewis names “the entrence of the S. E. branch of the Columbia,” Clark substitutes the more familiar designation “the enterance of Lewis’s River.” These small divergences suggest one captain copied from a shared draft and adjusted vocabulary to his own habits — Clark consistently preferring local nomenclature he had helped coin.
Both men articulate the same shift in subsistence philosophy with an almost identical philosophical aside:
we now view the horses as our only certain resource for food, nor do we look forward to it with any detestation or borrow, so soon is the mind which is occupyed with any interesting object reconciled to it’s situation.
Clark renders “borrow” as “horrow” — both apparently miscopying “horror” — a textual fingerprint confirming a shared exemplar.
The River on the Mat
The day’s geographical revelation belongs to the Shah-ha-la visitors. Lewis records that eight men arrived by canoe and pointed out two young Cash-hooks among them who lived at the falls of a large southern tributary. Asked to describe it, the informants
drew on a mat with a coal. it appeared that this river which they called Mult-no-mah discharged itself behind the Island which we called the image canoe Island and as we had left this island to the S. both in ascending and decending the river we had never seen it.
Clark’s account of the same scene matches Lewis closely but adds an ethnographic detail Lewis omits: the Shah-ha-la “reside on the opposit Side of the Columbia near Some pine trees which they pointed to in the bottom South of the Dimond Island.” The captains’ admission that the expedition had twice missed the mouth of a major river — once descending in November, once ascending now — is candid, and it justifies Clark’s immediate decision to return downstream with a small party. Lewis frames this as Clark’s choice (“Capt. Clark determined to return”), while Clark frames it in the first person (“I deturmined to take a Small party”), and only Clark names the men: “Thompson J. Potts, Peter Crusat, P. Wiser.”
Ordway and Gass: The View from the Ranks
Ordway’s entry, written from the perspective of a sergeant, captures information the captains compress or omit. He explains the strategic context the captains take for granted — that “from numerous parties of Indians coming down the river it was learned that game was exceedingly scarce above, and that the salmon would not arrive until about the first of May.” He also fixes a target the captains do not mention in their entries: the hunters are to remain “untill the hunters kill 9 or 10 Elk and jurk the meat.” Ordway alone notes the social texture of the camp at day’s end: “30 odd Savages Camped with us, men women & children.”
Ordway also independently registers the new river, calling attention to it as something “we had not Seen,” and notes that Clark “took an Indian along for a guide” — a detail Lewis specifies as a Cashhook hired for the price of a burning glass. The agreement among three narrators on the hiring of a guide, with each supplying a different particular, illustrates how the expedition’s collective record accumulates through complementary observation.
Gass, characteristically terse, condenses the entire day to two sentences and reports only what concerns him directly: “3 parties went out to hunt. Myself and 4 men went below the mouth of Sandy river, and killed an elk, some deer and a black bear.” He registers neither the planning resolution nor the Multnomah revelation. His silence is itself revealing: the carpenter-sergeant’s journal tracks labor and provisions, leaving cartography and diplomacy to those whose duty it was to record them.
Patterns of the Day
April 2 illustrates the expedition’s documentary stratification with unusual clarity. The captains’ near-identical philosophical reflection demonstrates joint composition; Ordway supplies the rationale and the headcount the captains omit; Gass attends to the hunt. Only by reading across the four does the full day emerge: a strategic pivot toward horse-based travel, a meat-drying operation on the Columbia’s north bank, and the belated entry of the Willamette into the geography of the United States — sketched in coal on a woven mat.
