The entries of November 4, 1805, capture the Corps of Discovery’s passage through the lower Columbia tidewater, a stretch where Native villages were larger, more numerous, and more deeply enmeshed in coastal trade than anything the party had encountered upriver. Three journalists — William Clark, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway — describe the same day’s events, but the differences among their accounts illuminate how each man saw, selected, and shaped what he wrote down.
A Shared Itinerary, Three Registers
All three narrators agree on the day’s basic outline: an early start after a tide that rose overnight, a stop at a substantial village, the introduction of the wapato root, and a 28-mile run to a camp on the north (starboard) side. Gass, characteristically economical, compresses the day into a single tidy paragraph. He notes the tide “raised the water last night two feet,” the village’s “52 canoes, well calculated for riding waves,” and the wapato roots, which he describes with a craftsman’s precision:
The roots are of a superior quality to any I had before seen: they are called whapto; resemble a potatoe when cooked, and are about as big as a hen egg.
Clark independently records the same comparison — “round root near the Size of a hens egg roasted which they call Wap-to” — suggesting either a shared conversation about the food at camp or a stable expedition vocabulary already forming around this new staple. Ordway echoes the description more loosely (“some excelent roots nearly like potatoes”), without naming the root. The convergence across three pens marks November 4 as the effective introduction of wapato into the expedition’s working knowledge of Columbia subsistence.
The Stolen Tomahawk: Whose Story Is It?
The day’s most revealing divergence concerns a small theft. Clark, the victim, gives the fullest and most personal account:
dureing the time I was at Dinner the Indians Stold my tomahawk which I made use of to Smoke I Serched but Could not find it
Ordway reports the same incident, but at one remove and with added detail about the perpetrators and their armament:
two canoe loads of Savages followed us and Stole Capt Clarks pipe tommahawk which he had been Smoaking with them, we could not find it with them, they had several muskets on board of their canoes
Ordway’s phrasing — “Capt Clarks pipe tommahawk” and the collective “we could not find it” — suggests he is reconstructing the episode from camp talk rather than firsthand observation, and his pairing of the theft with the muskets in the same sentence subtly frames the encounter as a security concern. Gass omits the theft entirely. His silence is consistent with his pattern throughout the journals of suppressing incidents that reflect tension or embarrassment, preserving instead a clean narrative of progress and provisioning.
Trade Goods, Sea Otter, and a Misidentified Peak
Each narrator notices the village’s accumulated European goods, but at different resolutions. Gass writes generally of “a great deal of new cloth … and other articles.” Ordway adds specificity: “considerable of cloaths of different kinds among them, wool hats &C.” Clark, the most observant inventorier, supplies a near-manifest:
I Saw Some Guns, a Sword, maney Powder flasks, Salers jackets, overalls, hats & Shirts, Copper and Brass trinkets with few Beeds only.
That catalogue — particularly the sailor’s jackets and the relative scarcity of beads — reads as ethnographic evidence that this village traded directly or near-directly with maritime vessels rather than through a long inland chain. The villagers’ own report, recorded by Gass, that “in two days we would come to two ships with white people in them,” reinforces the inference. Ordway alone notes a further proof of coastal contact: an Indian who “could talk & Speak Some words [of] English Such as curseing and blackguard,” along with “a number of sea otter in the River” — observations Clark and Gass both miss or omit.
The day closes with a shared sighting of a snow-covered peak, which Gass and Ordway both call “Mount Rainy.” Clark, looking at the same mountain, identifies it as “Mount Hellen” and bears it “N. 25° E about 80 miles” — connecting it to a peak the party had seen weeks earlier near the river forks. Modern geography vindicates Clark: the mountain visible from this stretch is Mount St. Helens, not Rainier. The sergeants’ shared error suggests they were repeating a name circulating in camp, while Clark, working from his compass and his memory of the upriver sighting, reasoned independently — and correctly — about which peak stood before them.
