The journal entries of April 3, 1806, capture the Lewis and Clark expedition operating on two fronts simultaneously. While Captain Clark concluded a reconnaissance of what the party would come to call the Multnomah (the Willamette), Captain Lewis remained at the main camp managing hunters, drying meat, and observing the steady stream of Native families descending the Columbia in search of food. Sergeants Gass and Ordway, writing from the encampment, supply the operational details that frame both captains’ more expansive accounts.
Clark’s Discovery and Lewis’s Summary
Clark’s entry is the longest and most narratively ambitious of the four. He records sounding the unknown river with a five-fathom cord without reaching bottom and concludes, with characteristic geographic confidence, that this stream
must Water that vast tract of Country betwen the Western range of mountains and those on the Sea coast and as far S. as the Waters of Callifornia about Latd. 37° North
Lewis, who did not accompany the side expedition, condenses Clark’s findings into a single sentence and notes that an Indian informant supplied a sketch map: “he found the entrance of the large river of which the Indians had informed us, just at the upper part of wappetoe Island.” Ordway, drawing on the same returning party, gives the river’s width as “500 yd” and reports that Clark’s group ascended it seven miles — a specific figure absent from Clark’s own surviving prose for this date. Ordway also preserves the ethnographic intelligence Clark gathered: the “Clack-amus Nation of 30 Towns” and the more distant “Callap-no-wah Nation who are verry numerous.” The pattern is familiar across the journals: Clark records the geographic argument, Lewis summarizes, and Ordway tends to retain the hard numbers and Indigenous place-names.
Hunger, Smallpox, and the Limits of Welcome
Where Clark’s account turns toward triumph, Lewis’s turns toward distress. He notes the decending families and writes,
these poor people appeared to be almost starved, they picked up the bones and little peices of refuse meat which had been thrown away by the party.
This is among the more striking observations of Native hunger in the journals, and it is unique to Lewis on this date — Gass and Ordway, both writing in shorter compass, mention only “Slight Showers of rain” and the routine business of jerking elk meat. Lewis also takes the opportunity to record clothing details: the mink or polecat skin girdle, the deerskin cap with ears attached, and porcupine-quill collars worked “after the method of the Shoshonees.” Ethnographic catalog of this kind is more typical of Lewis than of Clark, whose own entry instead dwells on architecture — the long house of his pilot with seven thirty-foot apartments opening onto cedar-plank passages.
Clark’s most somber passage answers a question that haunts the entry. Surveying “the wreck of 5 houses remaining of a very large Village,” he asks his hosts what became of the population. An old man, father to Clark’s guide,
brought foward a woman who was badly marked with the Small Pox and made Signs that they all died with the disorder which marked her face, and which She was verry near dieing with when a Girl.
Read alongside Lewis’s note that Native informants “confirm the report of the scarcity of provision among the natives above,” the day’s record sketches a Lower Columbia world reshaped by epidemic depopulation and seasonal famine — conditions invisible in Gass’s brief notice of a bear den and three cubs.
The Sergeants’ Margins
Gass’s entry is the shortest and most domestic, focused on retrieving a bear carcass in rain too heavy to permit drying meat. Ordway provides the diplomatic texture missing elsewhere: the visitors of the previous night, he reports, “were of five different nations and had Several prisoners among them.” Neither captain mentions these prisoners. The detail is a reminder that the sergeants’ journals, often treated as derivative, sometimes preserve information the officers omit — whether from oversight, discretion, or the press of other matters. On April 3, the four narrators together produce a fuller record than any one of them alone: a great river charted, a starving people observed, a smallpox survivor presented in evidence, and, almost in passing, captives among the guests at last night’s fire.
