The expedition’s upriver passage through the Cascades of the Columbia on April 9, 1806 produced four overlapping accounts that diverge in revealing ways. All four men — Lewis, Clark, Ordway, and Gass — describe halting at a village on the north bank, breakfasting, and acquiring five dogs. But only three mention the tomahawk recovery, and only Clark records a midnight episode involving an attempted theft. The day offers an unusually clear case study in what each journalist chose to elevate and what each let pass.
The Tomahawk Episode: Convergence and Divergence
Lewis and Clark’s entries on the recovered tomahawk track each other so closely that one almost certainly drew on the other. Lewis writes that Colter “observed the tomehawk in one of the lodges which had been stolen from us on the 4th of November last as we decended this river; the natives attempted to wrest the tomahawk from him but he retained it.” Clark’s version is nearly identical in structure:
Colter observed the Tomahawk which was Stolen from on the 4th of Novr. last as we decended the Columbia, he took the tomahawk the natives attempted to wrest it from him, he held fast the Tomahawk.
Both captains then record the villagers’ attempt to “exculpate” (Lewis) or “excuse” (Clark) themselves by claiming purchase from downriver natives, and both note that neighbors had earlier confirmed the theft. The shared phrasing — “odium of stealing/having stolen it” appears in both — suggests collaborative drafting or direct copying.
Ordway, writing in the enlisted ranks, gives the episode a different texture. He identifies the object more specifically as “Capt Clarks pipe tommahawk” and locates the original theft “below Quick Sand River.” His account of the villagers’ reaction is more vivid than the captains’: they “appeared to be highly afronted at our taking it but were afraid to Show it.” Where Lewis writes in the diplomatic abstract, Ordway records the suppressed emotion of the encounter.
Gass omits the tomahawk entirely. His brief entry mentions only that the party “took breakfast here and bought 5 dogs from them” — a striking compression given that the recovery was the day’s most charged event.
Ethnography, Geography, and Register
Lewis devotes the longest passage to ethnographic detail, describing house construction (“generally built with boards and covered with Cedar bark”), interior divisions, and the women’s nose ornaments. He distinguishes the Wah-clel-lahs from the Clahclellars and tracks each band’s seasonal movement. Clark covers similar ground but with different emphasis, counting structures with a surveyor’s precision: “14 houses only appear occupied… 9 houses has been latterly abandened and 14 others is yet is thinly inhabited.” Clark also notes the arrival of a Chee-luck-kit-le-quaw trading party returning from the Columbia Valley with “Wappato, beeds and dried Anchovies” exchanged for “pounded fish Shappalell, bear grass, acorns boiled berries.” Lewis omits this trading encounter entirely.
Gass and Ordway, by contrast, attend to matters the captains pass over. Gass records the women’s dress with a bluntness the officers avoid:
The women all wear the small leather bandage, but are quite naked otherwise, except what is covered by the small robe they wear round their shoulders.
Ordway notes that the river was “much higher at this time than it was last fall when we passd down” and that “Some Spots of Snow is now on the tops of these Mountains Near the River” — environmental observations absent from the captains’ entries. He also catches a geographic correction: “a large creek puts in close above the village which we did not discover last fall.”
Clark’s Solo Episode: The Midnight Intruder
Only Clark opens his entry with a nocturnal scene from the previous night, describing an elderly man who had been caught stealing a spoon the day before:
Crept upon his belley with his hands and feet, with a view as I Suppose to take Some of our baggage… the Sentinal observed the motions of this old amcinated retch untill he got with a fiew feet of the baggage at he hailed him and approached with his gun in a possion as if going to Shoote which allarmed the old retch in Such a manner that he ran with all his power tumbleing over brush and every thing in his way.
Lewis, Ordway, and Gass make no mention of the incident. Whether the captains conferred and Clark alone chose to record it, or whether Lewis simply began his entry with the morning’s reloading, the omission illustrates how even the closely paired captains’ journals retain individual editorial judgment. Read together, the four entries show an expedition negotiating a charged reunion with people they had wronged or been wronged by, and four narrators sorting that day’s experience along quite different lines.
