The expedition’s departure from the Walla Walla village on April 30, 1806, produced four parallel journal entries that, read together, illustrate the layered documentary practice of the Corps of Discovery. Patrick Gass, John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis each recorded the morning’s horse-collecting, the eleven o’clock departure, and the fourteen-mile march to a branch of the Walla Walla River — but the four accounts diverge in striking ways that reveal both the captains’ shared drafting habits and the enlisted men’s independent observational instincts.
The Captains’ Shared Draft
Clark and Lewis produced what is essentially the same entry. Both open with identical phrasing — “This morning we had some dificuelty in Collecting our horses notwithstanding we had hobbled & Picqueted those we obtained of these people” — and both proceed through the same sequence: the purchase of two horses, the exchange with the Chopunnish man, the ethnographic note on his menstruating daughter, the loss and recovery of Yelleppit’s white horse, and the eleven o’clock departure. The wording tracks so closely that one was clearly copied from the other, with only minor orthographic variation (Clark’s “Yelleppit” against Lewis’s “Yellept,” Clark’s “doughter” against Lewis’s “daughter”).
Yet small differences matter. Clark writes that the party “purchased two other horses this morning and 4 dogs,” while Lewis writes “two other horses this morning and several dogs.” Lewis is more precise about the tributary’s geography, noting it “discharges itself about six miles above the junction of that river with the Columbia” and judging it “navigable for canoes” — observations Clark omits. Conversely, Clark provides a fuller botanical inventory of the creek bottom:
it consists of Cotton wood, birch, the Crimson haw, red willow, Sweet willow, Choke Cherry, yellow Current, goose berry, white berried honey suckle, rose bushes, Seven bark, Shoemate &c. &c.
Lewis instead pivots to dietary ethnography, recording that the Walla Walla “will not eat the dog but feast heartily on the otter which is vastly inferior in my estimation” — a characteristically opinionated aside absent from Clark’s parallel passage.
What Gass and Ordway See Differently
The enlisted journals operate on a different register entirely. Gass is terse and quartermasterly: he gives the running horse count (“twenty-three horses”), the distance (“about fourteen miles”), the game tally (“two pheasants, one of which Capt. Clarke killed”), and a brisk landscape note about the sandy plain and its sage-like shrubs. He does not mention the Chopunnish daughter, the exchanged horse, or Yelleppit’s white horse. His entry is a logistics report.
Ordway, by contrast, captures a scene the captains pass over entirely:
an Indian brought a woman to Cap* Clark which [was] diseased, had not the use of hir limbs, he brought a fine horse and gave Cap* Clark for doctering hir he gave meddicine and told them how to apply it &C. Cap* Clark gave the Indian a white Shirt which pleased him verry much
Neither Lewis nor Clark records this medical exchange, despite Clark himself being the practitioner involved. Ordway also preserves an ethnobotanical detail the captains miss — the indigenous name for the sage-like shrub: “the Indian name of it is cum-cum,” used dried for cooking fires. And he alone notes that “Several of the horses chokd by eating some kind of a weed in this bottom, but they got over it after a while,” a small veterinary crisis invisible in the official record.
Patterns of Omission
The cross-narrator pattern is instructive. The captains’ shared draft prioritizes ethnographic generalization (the puberty seclusion custom), geographic placement (the creek’s relation to the Columbia), and natural-history cataloguing. The enlisted journals — Gass terse, Ordway expansive — preserve the operational texture: how many dogs, which weed sickened the horses, what the shrub was called, what trade goods changed hands at a bedside. Ordway’s record of Clark trading medical advice for a horse and a shirt is the kind of transaction that reshapes how the expedition’s twenty-three-horse herd was actually assembled, yet it survives only because a sergeant thought it worth writing down. Read in isolation, any single entry flattens the day; read together, the four accounts restore its dimensionality.
This analysis was AI-assisted and reviewed by a human editor.
