The events of April 22, 1806, as the Corps moved overland along the Columbia toward the Walla Walla country, are recorded by all four of the day’s surviving journalists. The shared incidents — Charbonneau’s bolting packhorse, a robe concealed by villagers, the high wind that kept the canoes on the opposite shore, and the purchase of dogs and shapaleel (cous bread) at successive villages — provide an unusually clean opportunity to compare how rank, temperament, and physical position within the column shaped each man’s narrative.
The Robe Incident: Lewis’s Fury, Clark’s Distance
The most revealing divergence concerns the missing robe. Lewis, who was in the rear of the column when Charbonneau’s horse threw its load, gives the episode a full paragraph charged with personal anger:
being now confident that the Indians had taken it I sent the Indian woman on to request Capt. C. to halt the party and send back some of the men to my assistance being determined either to make the indians deliver the robe or birn their houses… they have vexed me in such a manner by such repeated acts of villany that I am quite disposed to treat them with every severyty, their defenseless state pleads forgivness so far as rispects their lives.
Clark, ahead with the main party, records the same event but at an emotional remove: “the Indians hid the robe and delayed Capt. Lewis and the rear party Some time before they found the robe which was in a lodge hid behind their baggage, and took possession of it.” Clark’s syntax is administrative; Lewis’s is confessional. Notably, Clark omits Lewis’s threat to burn the lodges entirely — a silence that may reflect either Clark’s distance from the scene or his editorial discretion.
Ordway, marching with the front, compresses the affair to a single clause: “one of the Indians Stole a robe & hid it in one of their lodges, we found it & proced on.” Gass, traveling with one of the canoes on the river, does not mention the robe at all — he could not have witnessed it. The four accounts together map the column itself: Lewis at the rear and inside the conflict, Clark forward and informed by report, Ordway in the marching middle, Gass detached on the water.
The View from the Hill: Captains’ Geography, Sergeants’ Logistics
While Lewis dealt with the robe, Clark climbed a high hill and produced the day’s most ambitious geographical passage, fixing bearings to Mount Hood (S. 30° W.) and Mount Jefferson (S. to W., snow-covered) and speculating on the forks of “Clarks river.” Lewis, writing later, reproduces Clark’s observations almost verbatim — Mount Jefferson at “S. 10 W.” in Lewis versus “S to W” in Clark, Mount Hood at “S. 30 W.” in both, the river forking “at the distance of 18 or 20 miles” in Lewis and “at about 18 or 20 miles” in Clark. This is a textbook instance of Lewis copying Clark’s field observations into his own journal, a practice well documented across the expedition’s later months.
Ordway and Gass, by contrast, register no mountains and no bearings. Their journals attend to commerce and weather: Ordway notes “we bought a dog and a little firewood” and later “a horse 5 dogs and a little wood and considerable of new chappalell.” Gass tallies “two more horses” and “some more dogs and shapaleel.” The captains look outward at the continental skyline; the sergeants count the day’s provisions.
Register and Spelling
The orthographic textures also diverge sharply. Clark’s prose is, as ever, phonetically improvised — “assended,” “dureing,” “Shapillele,” “Chapellell,” “troublesom,” “extreemly” — and he spells the trade bread differently within a single entry. Lewis writes a more polished hand (“emmenense,” “disencumbered,” “villany”) and reaches for moral vocabulary Clark does not employ. Ordway settles on “chappalell” and “Wal-a-wal,” while Gass, whose journal was already being prepared with publication in mind, gives the cleanest text of the four: “shapaleel,” complete sentences, no bearings, no temper.
Read together, the four April 22 entries do not merely corroborate one another; they triangulate. The robe is angriest where Lewis stands, faintest where Gass floats. The mountains are sharpest where Clark climbs, absent where the sergeants march. The captains share a geography; the sergeants share a commissary. A single day on the Columbia, refracted four ways, demonstrates how the expedition’s documentary record is itself a function of who was looking, from where, and at what.
