The journals of October 31, 1805 offer an unusually clear demonstration of how division of labor at the Cascades of the Columbia produced division of narrative attention. Captain William Clark, freed from immediate portage duties, undertakes a ten-mile reconnaissance downriver. Sergeant Patrick Gass remains with the work party hauling canoes over rocks. Sergeant John Ordway records the smaller domestic economy of the camp itself. The result is three entries that scarcely overlap in subject matter, yet together reconstruct the full operation of the expedition on a single rainy Thursday.
Clark’s Ethnographic Reconnaissance
Clark’s entry is by far the longest and most observationally dense of the three, occupying the role of expedition ethnographer that he and Lewis typically shared. Taking Joseph Fields and Pierre Cruzatte, he proceeds roughly ten miles downstream to scout the remaining rapids. The bulk of his entry, however, is devoted not to hydrography but to a detailed description of eight burial vaults he encounters:
I saw 8 Vaults for the Dead which was nearly Square 8 feet Closely Covered with broad boads Curiously engraved, the bones in Some of those vaults wer 4 feet thick, in others the Dead was yet layed Side of each other nearly East & west, raped up & bound Securley in robes, great numbers of trinkets Brass Kittle, Sea Shells, Iron, Pan Hare &c. &c. was hung about the vaults and great many wooden gods, or Images of men Cut in wood, Set up round the vaults
Clark is careful to register the limits of his own interpretation — "I can not learn certainly if those people worship those woden emiges" — a methodological caution that recurs throughout his Columbia-basin entries. He also notes restraint at an abandoned set of four houses farther on: "I did not disturb any thing about those houses." The presence of brass kettles and iron among the grave goods is itself significant evidence of an active trade network reaching the Cascades from the coast, a point Clark records without comment but which his later entries would corroborate. He further describes Strawberry Island as "verry rich, open & covered with Strawberry vines, and has greatly the appearance of having at Some period been Cultivated," an observation no other narrator on this date supplies.
Gass on the Labor Clark Was Spared
While Clark walked downstream, Gass was with the men moving the canoes. His entry is brief and instrumental, but its force lies in its physical specificity:
our canoes and took them past the rapids, some part of the way by water, and some over rocks 8 or 10 feet high. It was the most fatiguing business we have been engaged in for a long time, and we got but two over all day, the distance about a mile, and the fall of the water about 25 feet in that distance.
Gass quantifies what Clark only glances at: a 25-foot fall over a single mile, rocks eight to ten feet high to be surmounted, and only two canoes successfully moved in a full day’s labor. The superlative — "the most fatiguing business we have been engaged in for a long time" — is uncharacteristic for Gass, whose register is normally restrained, and signals that this stretch of the Columbia ranks among the hardest passages of the expedition to date. Clark’s entry never mentions this difficulty, since he was not present for it.
Ordway’s Domestic Register
Ordway’s entry is the shortest and operates at yet a third scale — that of the camp itself rather than the river or the portage:
the natives came to the fort with wapatoe roots we bought Several bags from them, we built a box for the centinel to Stand in out of the rain dug 2 Sinques [sinks] &C.
Three activities are compressed into a single sentence: trade with local Indians for wapato, construction of a sentry shelter, and the digging of latrines. Ordway alone records the trade in wapato roots — a staple the expedition would depend on increasingly through the lower Columbia winter — and he alone notes that the encampment had hardened into something the men were calling a "fort," with sentry posts and sanitary infrastructure. Where Clark looks outward and Gass looks at the rocks underfoot, Ordway looks at the camp.
Patterns Across the Three Entries
No narrator on this date appears to have copied or consulted another; the entries are mutually exclusive in content rather than overlapping. This is itself a pattern worth noting at the Cascades, where the captains’ physical separation from the main work party freed each journal-keeper to record his own sphere. The composite picture — Clark cataloging vaults and villages, Gass measuring the cost of a mile of portage, Ordway buying wapato and digging sinks — is recoverable only by reading the three together.
