The expedition’s October 12, 1805 entries describe a single day on the Snake River above a bad rapid the party declined to run after dark. Yet the three surviving accounts — by William Clark, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway — diverge sharply in what each narrator considered worth recording. Read together, they reveal the distinct documentary habits that made the journals collectively richer than any one of them alone.
Mileage, Geography, and the Captain’s Eye
Clark’s entry is, characteristically, the most technically detailed. He opens with provisioning —
after purchaseing every Speces of the provisions those Indians could Spare we Set out and proceeded on
— and then proceeds to log a running geographic survey: four islands at three miles, a large creek at fourteen and a half miles on the larboard side, a meridian altitude reading of 72° 30′ 00″, and a river width of 400 yards. His description of the rapid that halted the party is the most precise of the three:
we found long and dangerous about 2 miles in length, and maney turns necessary to Stear Clare of the rocks, which appeared to be in every direction.
Clark also records that the small pilot canoe and the Indians ran the rapid while the main party encamped above to scout it by daylight — a decision he frames as deliberate caution. His landscape note is bleak and exact: “open plains, no timber of any kind a fiew Hack berry bushes & willows excepted,” with hills “faced with a dark ruged Stone.”
Ordway’s Compression, Gass’s Ethnography
Ordway, by contrast, compresses the day to a few lines. He notes “old fishing camps along the Shores, high plains no timber,” gives the day’s distance as 35 miles (Clark and Gass record 30), and ends with the bare observation that “our Small pilot canoe and the Indian canoe went over [the rapids] this evening.” Ordway’s discrepancy in mileage is typical of his journal, which often rounds or estimates where Clark measures.
Gass takes the day in a different direction altogether. Where Clark catalogues geography and Ordway logs progress, Gass turns ethnographer. He is the only narrator on this date to describe the Indigenous settlements in any detail:
Some of the Flathead nation of Indians live all along the river this far down. There are not more than 4 lodges in a place or village, and these small camps or villages are 8 or 10 miles apart: at each camp there are 5 or 6 small canoes.
Gass — whom the captains had named sergeant after Floyd’s death — also distinguishes seasonal architecture, noting summer lodges “made of willows and flags” and winter lodges “of split pine, almost like rails, which they bring down on rafts to this part of the river where there is no timber.” That last detail is genuinely observational: Gass has reasoned out a regional trade in building material from the absence of standing timber that Clark and Ordway both note but do not explain.
What Each Narrator Misses
The contrasts cut both ways. Gass omits Clark’s careful latitude observation and the creek mouth at 14½ miles. Ordway omits nearly everything except mileage and the rapid. Clark, despite his geographic precision, says nothing of the lodge counts or canoe inventories that Gass found significant — though he does remark on the scarcity of firewood, a practical concern Gass folds into his ethnographic explanation.
The mileage discrepancy itself is worth noting. Clark and Gass agree on 30 miles to the camp above the rapid; Ordway records 35. Since Clark was the expedition’s primary surveyor and Gass frequently mirrors Clark’s distances, Ordway’s higher figure likely reflects independent estimation rather than access to a different measurement.
Game is the one subject on which all three are essentially silent — and Gass makes that silence itself into evidence: “There is no four-footed game of any kind near this part of the river, that we could discover; and we saw no birds of any kind, but a few hawks, eagles and crows.” The party’s increasing reliance on purchased dried fish, foregrounded in Clark’s opening sentence, is the unstated subtext of Gass’s inventory of absence.
Taken together, the October 12 entries show a documentary division of labor — Clark surveying, Ordway tallying, Gass observing peoples and dwellings — that no single journal could replace.
