The entries of September 23, 1805, divide the expedition geographically and rhetorically. William Clark and John Ordway write from the Nez Perce villages on the Clearwater, where the captains are distributing medals and flags and bargaining for roots and salmon. Patrick Gass, traveling with the rear party still descending the Bitterroots, records a different day entirely — one of horse meat, lost baggage, and the first glimpses of the valley below. Reading the three accounts together exposes how task and position shaped what each man chose to write down.
Diplomacy at the Villages: Clark and Ordway in Parallel
Clark’s field entry is characteristically terse, a checklist of diplomatic transactions: he made three chiefs, distributed medals, tobacco, handkerchiefs, knives, and a flag, and reserved a flag and handkerchiefs for the absent great chief. His expanded entry adds the rationale — the captains assembled the principal men and “by Signs informed them where we came from where bound our wish to inculcate peace and good understanding between all the red people.” Clark also lets personal suffering surface in a way the field note does not:
Capt. Lewis & 2 men verry Sick this evening, my hip verry Painfull
Ordway covers the same ceremony but reorders the priorities. Where Clark leads with diplomacy, Ordway leads with ethnography. He notes that the Nez Perce
are now laying up food for the winter and in the Spring they are going over on the medicine River and Missourie River to hunt the buffalow.
He catalogs their copper kettles, their preference for blue beads, their elk, deer, and mountain sheep skin clothing, the scarcity of buffalo robes, and the construction of leather and “flag” (rush-mat) lodges. Only after this inventory does he mention the gifting of flags and medals — the very transaction Clark places first. The two narrators witnessed the same afternoon, but Ordway writes as observer of a people, Clark as agent of a government.
Both men note the evening thunder shower; Clark dates it more precisely (“at dark a hard wind from The S W accompaned with rain which lasted half an hour”), while Ordway gives only “a Thunder Shower this evening.” Both record the move two miles down to the second village. Ordway’s entry, however, contains a detail Clark omits: “we loaded up left one man to look for his horse,” tying the village scene back to the same logistical anxiety that dominates Gass’s day on the mountain.
Gass on the Ridge: A Different Expedition
Gass, miles behind, knows nothing of medals or chiefs. His September 23 is a march along a wooded ridge with horse flesh for dinner and Lewis’s baggage gone astray:
here we discovered that a horse, having Capt. Lewis’s clothes and baggage on him, had got into the bushes while we were loading the meat, and was left behind.
Gass’s prose, shaped by his role as sergeant of the rear detachment, is the most narratively shaped of the three. He records the morning weather, the 9 o’clock start, the mile to the small glade where the hunters had killed and hung a horse, the note Clark left informing them he had pushed forward, the noon halt, the lost pack horse, the search parties, and the night descent. He is also the only narrator on this date to register an aesthetic and geological response to the country:
rocks, that appear to be well calculated for making millstones; and some beautiful tall cedars among the spruce pine.
And it is Gass alone who articulates the comparative observation that the western slope’s soil “appears much better than on the east; and not so rocky” — a judgment shaped by his having actually crossed both faces of the range, an experience Clark had behind him but did not pause to record.
Cross-Narrator Patterns
Three patterns emerge. First, register: Clark writes administratively, Ordway ethnographically, Gass narratively. Second, the captains’ physical decline is visible only in Clark’s longer entry — Ordway, who is at the same village, says nothing of Lewis being sick or Clark’s painful hip, suggesting either tact or distance from the officers’ quarters. Third, the missing horse appears in both Gass and Ordway but refers to two different animals on two different parts of the trail, a coincidence that underscores how thinly stretched the expedition’s pack train had become as it staggered out of the Bitterroots. Where Clark records what the expedition gave to the Nez Perce, Gass records what the mountains were taking away.
