The entries of 29 September 1805 from Canoe Camp on the Clearwater offer an unusually clear demonstration of how three expedition narrators, writing on the same day in the same place, produced radically different documents. John Ordway, Patrick Gass, and William Clark each logged the day, but their pens travel in different directions: Ordway toward routine, Clark toward the medical roster, and Gass toward ethnography.
The Brevity of Routine
Ordway’s entry is the shortest of the three and the most procedural. He records only that the men were "hunting, all hands employed at the canoes as usal," and that "the Indians caught and Sold us Several Sammon." The phrase "as usal" is doing significant work here: by 29 September, canoe construction had become so routinized in Ordway’s mind that it required no elaboration. The salmon trade, likewise, is reduced to a transactional clause. Ordway’s register throughout the journals tends toward the noncommittal log entry, and this day exemplifies that tendency.
Clark’s two-part entry — a terse field note and a slightly fuller version — extends Ordway’s economy but redirects attention to bodies. He names hunters and counts game ("Drewyer killed 2 Deer Colter killed 1 Deer") and then dwells on illness:
a Cool morning wind from the S. W. men Sick as usial, all The men that are able to at work, at the Canoes… the after part of this day worm Cap Lewis very Sick, and most of the men complaning very much of ther bowels & Stomach
The phrase "Sick as usial" mirrors Ordway’s "as usal" almost exactly, and reflects a shared rhetorical fatigue: both men frame the day as continuation rather than event. But Clark alone records that Lewis himself was "very Sick" — a detail of considerable consequence, given that Lewis was the expedition’s principal medical authority and most prolific journalist. The bowel and stomach complaints Clark notes have long been linked by historians to the abrupt dietary shift from meat to camas root and salmon following the Bitterroot crossing.
Gass the Ethnographer
Gass’s entry stands apart. Where Ordway and Clark compress, Gass expands. He opens with a movement narrative — relocating camp five miles to the forks — and then turns his attention almost entirely to the "natives" who encamped alongside the party. His observations are precise and comparative:
There appears to be a kind of sheep in this country, besides the Ibex or mountain sheep, and which have wool on. I saw some of the skins, which the natives had, with wool four inches long, and as fine, white and soft as any I had ever seen.
This is almost certainly a reference to mountain goat (Oreamnos americanus) wool, which Plateau peoples traded north from the Salish Sea region. Gass — a carpenter by trade — measures the staple length and assesses fineness with the eye of someone accustomed to evaluating materials. He further notes that Lewis "procured this, which we considered a curiosity, in exchange for another buffalo robe," documenting a transaction that Lewis’s own journal for this stretch (largely silent) does not record.
Gass also offers a compressed economic and political ethnography of the band: their possession of "a great many beads and other articles, which they say they got from white men at the mouth of this river"; their reliance on Missouri hunts for buffalo robes; and the absence of most of the men, "at present on a war expedition against some nation to the northwest." None of this appears in Ordway or Clark for this date.
What the Comparison Reveals
Three patterns emerge. First, Ordway and Clark share a vocabulary of routine ("as usal," "as usial") that flattens the day; Gass resists this flattening. Second, only Clark notes the captains’ health — a reminder that Clark, with Lewis ailing, was effectively the sole captain-journalist for stretches of the Clearwater portage. Third, Gass’s willingness to digress into ethnography fills a documentary gap: where the captains’ journals are thinnest, Gass (whose published 1807 narrative was the first expedition account in print) supplies the texture later readers would expect. The convergence of all three narrators on a single camp, on a single day, shows how much of what we know about Canoe Camp depends on which pen we consult.
