By the final day of September 1805, the Corps of Discovery had been encamped at the forks of the Clearwater for several days, hollowing out ponderosa pine logs into the canoes that would carry them toward the Pacific. The party was severely weakened by illness contracted after their descent from the Bitterroots, and three narrators — Sergeant John Ordway, Sergeant Patrick Gass, and Captain William Clark — each set down brief notes on the day’s slow progress. Read together, the three entries reveal striking differences in observational range and narrative priority.
A Shared Frame: Weather, Weakness, and Work
All three narrators open with nearly identical formulas. Ordway begins with “fair morning,” Clark with “a fine fair morning,” and Gass implicitly within the same weather. Each notes that work on the canoes continued, though the men remained debilitated. Ordway puts it bluntly:
fair morning, we continued on with the work, the party so weak that we git along Slow with the canoes, towards evening our hunters returned one of them had killed a deer and a pheas-ant.
Clark’s parallel entry is more clinical, attentive to the precise count of the disabled:
a fine morning our men recruting a little cool, all at work doing Something except 2 which are verry Sick
The verb “recruting” — meaning recovering or regaining strength — appears in both Clark’s drafts of the day, and the same convalescent vocabulary echoes in Gass, who writes that he himself “feel much relieved from my indisposition.” Gass is the only narrator to insert his personal physical state into the record; Ordway and Clark generalize the men’s condition without first-person comment. The register difference is consistent across the journals: Gass, writing for eventual publication, allows the body of the diarist into the frame, while Ordway’s sergeant’s-log brevity and Clark’s command-level summary keep the individual subordinated to the party.
The Hunter, the Horse, and What Each Man Counts
A small narrative discrepancy emerges around the returning hunter. Ordway reports “our hunters” (plural) returning at evening, with one having killed a deer and a pheasant. Gass, by contrast, records that “the man came in who had gone to look for the horses, he had found one of them and killed a deer” — arriving at ten o’clock rather than evening, and framed not as a hunting party but as a horse-recovery errand that incidentally produced game. The pheasant Ordway notes is absent from Gass; the recovered horse Gass notes is absent from Ordway. Clark mentions neither.
What Clark does record, and what the sergeants both omit, is the river’s wildlife traffic: “Great run of Small duck passing down the river this morning,” a phrase he repeats almost verbatim in his second draft of the entry (“Great number of Small Ducks pass down the river”). Clark’s eye, even on a quiet camp day, returns to the river itself — its fauna, its volume, its movement — in a way that anticipates the navigational frame of the coming descent.
Gass Alone Sees the Diplomacy
The most consequential divergence is Gass’s account of an event the other two narrators pass over in silence:
In the evening the greater part of the war party came in, and some of the principal men came down to our camp. We could not understand what they had done, as we could only converse by signs. Medals were given by the Commanding Officers to 3 or 4 of them as leading men of their nation; and they remained about our camp.
Clark — who, with Lewis, presumably distributed the medals himself — does not mention the ceremony in either draft, though his second version does add the general observation that “maney Indians passing up and down the river.” Ordway is silent on the visit altogether. Gass alone reconstructs the diplomatic moment, including the candid admission that the captains awarded peace medals to Nez Perce leaders whose recent activities the Corps could not actually comprehend through sign communication. This is a meaningful gap: the official record of medal-distribution at Canoe Camp rests, on this date, primarily with the carpenter-sergeant rather than with the commanding officer.
Gass closes with an ethnographic and geographic flourish absent from the others — the river’s width of two hundred yards, its crystalline water, the stony bottom, the abundance of salmon — details that read as composed for a reader rather than logged for command. The contrast with Ordway’s terse close, which the editor notes is the final entry in the first recovered section of his journal, underscores how differently these three men understood the act of keeping a journal at the same fire on the same day.
