On October 4, 1805, the Corps of Discovery was encamped along the Clearwater River at what would become known as Canoe Camp, hollowing out dugouts for the descent toward the Columbia. Three journals survive from this date — those of John Ordway, Patrick Gass, and William Clark — and the variation among them is unusually pronounced. Read side by side, the entries highlight how differently each man framed the same twenty-four hours.
Ordway’s Brevity, Gass’s Misplaced March
Ordway’s entry is characteristically terse, confined to logistical notes about canoe construction and provisioning:
Some of the canoes ready to dress out. Some of the party bought a fat dog. the hunters killed nothing this day.
The detail of the “fat dog” purchase is the kind of camp economy Ordway tracks consistently — he is the expedition’s quartermaster of small transactions. He notes the hunters’ failure without comment, treating it as a data point rather than a hardship.
Gass’s entry, by contrast, presents a striking problem. He describes the party crossing “four mountains” and encamping in a valley, with two men sent to hunt and the rest to fish:
hunters went on ahead and about 4 o’clock we got over the four mountains, and encamped in the valley. Two men went to hunt, and all the rest to fish.
This account does not match the situation at Canoe Camp on October 4, where the party was stationary and engaged in canoe-building. Gass — or his editor David McKeehan, who prepared the 1807 published version of the journal — appears to have either misdated the entry or compressed events from the Lolo Trail crossing of late September into this date. The mention of fishing, two salmon procured from a guide, and a single beaver killed suggests an earlier mountain-passage scene, not the Clearwater bottoms. Whatever the cause, the discrepancy is a useful reminder that Gass’s published text passed through editorial hands and cannot always be aligned to its dateline with confidence.
Clark’s Two Drafts and the Tobacco Incident
Clark, as often, produced two versions of the day — a field note and a fuller fair-copy entry. Both center on a confrontation absent from the other journals:
displeased an Indian by refuseing to let him have a pice of Tobacco.
In his expanded version Clark adds a telling clause: the Indian “tooke the liberty to take out of our Sack” the tobacco Clark would not give him. The shift from the first draft to the second tightens the narrative — Clark moves from a vague “displeasure” to a small property dispute, recasting himself less as an offender than as the offended party. Neither Ordway nor Gass mentions the encounter at all, suggesting either that it was minor enough to escape the enlisted men’s notice or that Clark, as a captain dealing with diplomatic relations, registered such frictions more keenly than his subordinates.
Clark also alone records the visit of three Indians from the “Grat River South of us” — the Snake — and the return of Fraser and Goodrich from a Nez Perce village with fish and roots. These are the kinds of intelligence and supply notes captains kept and privates did not.
The Body in the Journal
The most poignant divergence concerns the men’s physical condition. Ordway says nothing of health. Gass’s misaligned entry describes a “comfortable supper.” Clark, however, writes plainly:
as our horse is eaten we have nothing to eate except dried fish & roots which disagree with us verry much.
He also notes that “Capt Lewis Still Sick but able to walk about a little.” The dietary transition from Lolo Trail horseflesh to Nez Perce camas and salmon was producing widespread gastrointestinal illness throughout the corps — a fact corroborated elsewhere in Lewis’s and Clark’s later entries but here visible only in Clark’s pen. Ordway’s silence on the subject is striking; either the sergeant was less affected, or he simply did not consider bodily complaint a matter for the journal. Clark, writing partly as a medical observer of his co-captain and partly as a sufferer himself, treats illness as central to the day’s record.
Three Registers, One Camp
Together the entries demonstrate how genre and rank shaped the expedition’s documentary record. Ordway logs transactions; Gass (through McKeehan) produces a smoothed narrative whose chronology has slipped; Clark writes simultaneously as diplomat, commissary, and physician. A reader who consulted only one of these journals for October 4, 1805, would carry away a substantially incomplete — and in Gass’s case, possibly inaccurate — picture of the day at Canoe Camp.
