The expedition spent October 27, 1805, wind-bound at the mouth of a creek the local people called Quenett, near the Great Narrows of the Columbia. The day’s events were modest — hunters brought in four deer, two visiting chiefs were ferried back across a wave-tossed river, and a vocabulary was taken — yet the three surviving accounts diverge sharply in emphasis, register, and ethnographic ambition. Read together, they reveal how the expedition’s documentary labor was distributed across its narrators.
Three Registers of the Same Day
John Ordway’s entry is the briefest and most external. He records the hunt, the gift of a medal to a principal man, and the difficult crossing:
towards evening the hunters returned to camp had killed four Deer, we set the Indians across the River, the waves roled verry high.
Ordway notices what a sergeant on duty would notice — numbers, weather, movement of people across water. He offers no speculation about the visitors’ identity or speech.
Patrick Gass, by contrast, treats the day as an opportunity for ethnographic description. Where Ordway sees only “some of the Indians,” Gass tries to place them within a larger framework:
we cannot find out to what nation they belong. We suppose them to be a band of the Flathead nation, as all their heads are compressed into the same form; though they do not speak exactly the same language, but there is no great difference, and this may be a dialect of the same.
Gass then provides the day’s most extended set piece — a step-by-step technical account of cranial deformation, describing the boards, their placement “from the eye brows to the top of the first,” and the binding with skin thongs. This is the kind of detail neither Ordway nor Clark records on this date, and it suggests Gass, whose published 1807 journal was aimed at a curious reading public, was already shaping his entries with an audience in mind.
Clark the Linguist
William Clark’s two drafts of the entry — a field version and a fair-copy revision — show him pursuing a different ethnographic question: language. He distinguishes the E-nee-shur at the falls from the E-chee-lute at the narrows, noting with evident interest that
those people live only 6 miles apart, but fiew words of each others language
and that the upriver language has “great Similarity with those tribes of flat heads we have passed.” His observation about “the Clucking tone anexed which is predomint” — almost certainly a reference to the glottalized and ejective consonants characteristic of Chinookan and Sahaptian languages — is a perceptive phonetic note. Clark also reaches further down the river to compare the Che-luc-it-to-quar, a tribe Gass does not mention at all.
Comparing Clark’s two drafts is instructive. The field version reports that the seven visitors from below “returned down the river in a pet,” while the revised version softens and explains: they left “in a bad humer, haveing got into this pet by being prevented doeing as they wished with our articles which was then exposed to dry.” The revision adds a motive Clark either learned later or chose to clarify for posterity — that the visitors had been blocked from handling expedition goods spread out to dry.
What Only Clark Records
Two items appear only in Clark’s entries. The first is the petulant departure of the seven downriver visitors. Ordway, who notes that “some of the Indians Stayed with us,” is silent on those who left, and Gass mentions only that “Part of the natives remained.” Neither registers the friction.
The second is more striking: “Some words with Shabono about his dutyThe pinical of Falls mountain bears S 43° W. about 35 miles” in the field draft, repeated in the revision. This terse note of a quarrel with Toussaint Charbonneau — the interpreter hired at the Mandan villages — is the day’s only domestic conflict in the captains’ tent, and it survives only because Clark wrote it down. Whatever the dispute concerned, neither Ordway nor Gass appears to have known of it, or judged it worth recording.
The pattern across the three narrators is consistent with what scholars have observed elsewhere on the route: Ordway as terse logistician, Gass as descriptive ethnographer with an eye for the technical, and Clark as the captain who alone has access to internal command matters and who pursues comparative linguistic data the enlisted men do not attempt. The Quenett camp on October 27 offers each man’s habits in compact form.
