The Corps of Discovery spent October 9, 1805, encamped near the junction of the Clearwater and Snake rivers, drying baggage soaked the previous night and repairing a damaged canoe. Three journal-keepers — Sergeant Patrick Gass, Sergeant John Ordway, and Captain William Clark — left entries for the day, but the differences in what they record, and how, reveal much about the rhythms of expedition record-keeping and the temperament of each writer.
The Guide’s Quiet Departure
The defection of the old Shoshone guide and his son is the day’s most consequential event, and all three narrators note it — but with strikingly different framing. Gass, characteristically blunt, offers a hypothesis in a single sentence:
Here our old Snake guide deserted and took his son with him. I suspect he was afraid of being cast away passing the rapids.
Clark, writing in his field notes, registers only the bare fact and his puzzlement:
our 2 Snake Indian guides left us without our knowledge
In his fuller notebook entry, however, Clark expands the episode considerably, recording the conversation with the local chief about whether to send a rider after the guide:
we requested the Chief to Send a horseman after our old guide to come back and recive his pay &c. which he advised us not to do as his nation would take his things from him before he passed their camps
This is the kind of diplomatic detail Clark routinely captures and Gass routinely compresses or omits. Ordway, remarkably, says nothing of the guide at all — he had been detached with eight men to retrieve meat cached earlier, and his entry confines itself to that errand and the recovery of a canoe carried off by the tide. The contrast is a useful reminder that Ordway’s journal often reflects where his body was, not what the captains witnessed at camp.
The Woman with the Flint
Both Gass and Clark describe an unsettling scene involving a Native woman, but their interpretations diverge sharply. Gass reads the episode as genuine mental crisis:
At dark one of the squaws, who keep about us, took a crazy fit, and cut her arms from the wrists to the shoulders, with a flint; and the natives had great trouble and difficulty in getting her pacified.
Clark, by contrast, reads the same scene as performance, even as ritualized extortion:
a woman faind madness &c. &c. Singular acts of this woman in giveing in Small potions all She had & if they were not received She would Scarrify her Self in a horid manner
Where Gass sees a “crazy fit” requiring pacification, Clark sees feigned madness paired with insistent gift-giving — a culturally legible behavior he does not pretend to fully understand but is unwilling to read as madness. His field-note shorthand, “Singular acts of a Ind. woman,” shows the same observation seeded earlier in the day and elaborated in the evening’s fuller draft. Ordway, again, is silent. The episode survives only because two different observers, with two different frames, chose to write it down.
Labor, Weather, and the Texture of Camp
The three accounts agree on the day’s practical business: drying gear, repairing the canoe, trading for fish and dogs. Gass — himself a carpenter — notes simply that
we got her completed and all the baggage dry
Clark provides the labor roster Gass omits, naming Sergeant Pryor, Gass himself, Joseph Field, and Gibson as the repair crew, with others detailed to collect rosin. Clark also tracks the weather more carefully (“The morning Cool as usial,” later “a verry worm day”), notes that Captain Lewis is “recovring fast” from his recent illness, and observes the bluish-green color of the South Fork’s water — the kind of environmental detail Gass’s compressed register rarely accommodates.
Gass alone preserves a small ethnographic note about the party itself:
We have some Frenchmen, who prefer dog-flesh to fish; and they here got two or three dogs from the Indians.
This is the sort of internal-company observation the captains, writing for official posterity, tend to fold into impersonal collective verbs. Read together, the three entries confirm a familiar pattern: Clark for diplomacy, weather, and command-level detail; Gass for plain action and the texture of the men’s daily life; Ordway for whatever errand carried him beyond camp.
