The expedition’s arrival at the first great rapids of the Columbia — near present-day Celilo Falls and The Dalles — produced three markedly different journal entries on October 22, 1805. The contrasts among John Ordway, Patrick Gass, and William Clark illuminate not only what each narrator considered worth recording, but also how their narrative roles within the Corps shaped their attention.
Weather, Mileage, and Reconnaissance: Three Registers
Ordway’s entry is the briefest and the only one centered on weather and camp damage. He reports a stormy night with high winds from the southwest and notes that the swell
dashed one of our canoes against the logs and was near Splitting it before we got it out. dammaged it and obledged us to move some of our Camps.
Strikingly, neither Clark nor Gass mentions this canoe damage. Clark opens his entry by describing the morning as “a fine morning Calm,” and Gass likewise calls it an early start with abundant waterfowl. The discrepancy is partly chronological — Ordway is reporting overnight conditions while the others describe daytime travel — but it also reflects Ordway’s recurring tendency to log practical camp incidents the captains pass over.
Gass, by contrast, produces what reads almost like a sergeant’s logistical summary. He notes the 10 o’clock arrival at a large island, identifies the south-side tributary as the Sho-sho-ne or Ki-moo-ee-nem (the Snake), describes native lodges of “bulrushes and flags, made into a kind of mats,” and ends with the day’s tally:
About 3 miles lower down we came to the first falls or great rapids; and had 1300 yards of a portage over bad ground… Our voyage to-day, to the head of the rapids or falls was 18 miles.
Gass’s 1300-yard portage and Clark’s “distance 1200 yards” diverge by a hundred yards — a small but characteristic discrepancy that recurs throughout the journals when Gass paraphrases distances independently rather than copying from Clark’s courses-and-distances.
Clark’s Ethnographic and Geographic Detail
Clark’s double entry — a summary version followed by a longer narrative — is by far the most expansive. Where Gass mentions the Snake River in one sentence, Clark devotes a full paragraph to his and Lewis’s reconnaissance up the tributary’s mouth, observing
an emence body of water Compressd in a narrow Chanel of about 200 yds in width, fomeing over rocks maney of which presented their tops above the water
This is the river Gass calls the Sho-sho-ne and that Clark, tellingly, leaves unnamed: “this River haveing no Indian name that we could find out.” The contrast suggests Gass may have written or revised his entry later with the benefit of subsequently confirmed nomenclature, while Clark records the live ethnographic uncertainty of the moment.
Clark also captures details neither Ordway nor Gass records: the count of “17 Lodges of Indians” at the upper portage and “5 large Loges” below; the “20 parcels of dryed and pounded fish” on a small island; the neatness of the baskets weighing “about 90 or 100 pounds”; the hiring of Indigenous laborers to carry heavy articles; the purchase of a dog for supper; and the difficulty of obtaining firewood. Most striking is his geopolitical observation:
no Indians reside on the Lard Side for fear of the Snake Indians with whome they are at war and who reside on the large fork on the lard. a little above
This single sentence encodes intelligence about regional conflict that neither of the other narrators records — the kind of detail that distinguishes Clark as the expedition’s primary ethnographer and cartographer.
Patterns of Omission and Emphasis
Read together, the three entries demonstrate the complementary nature of the Corps’s documentary record. Ordway preserves the camp-level disruption — a damaged canoe, shifted tents — that the captains either did not witness or chose not to record. Gass produces a clean operational précis suitable for his later published narrative, with rounded mileages and tribal names normalized. Clark layers ethnography, hydrography, and political geography onto the same day’s events.
None of the three appears to be copying directly from another on this date; the divergent details (canoe damage, portage length, river naming) make textual dependence unlikely. Instead, October 22 stands as a useful case study in how three observers, traveling together through the same rapids, produced records that must be read in concert to reconstruct the day in full.
