The expedition’s upstream journey through the Cascades of the Columbia stalled on April 8, 1806, when a northeast gale forced the men to unload and haul up their canoes. All four journal-keepers present — Patrick Gass, John Ordway, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark — record the same enforced halt, but the day produces a striking divergence in what each man chooses to write down. Read together, the entries demonstrate how thoroughly the captains and the enlisted journalists had settled into distinct documentary roles by the final spring of the voyage.
The Same Wind, Four Registers
Ordway’s entry is the briefest and most utilitarian, a working camp log: the canoes filled with water, hunters went out, dried meat was put on a scaffold, the river rose a little, and the wind continued. Gass, writing for an eventual reading public, frames the same event with more shape and consequence, noting that the swells ran so high “that we had to unload our canoes, and haul some of them out of the water to prevent their being injured.” Gass alone uses the delay to digress backward over the winter at Fort Clatsop, reminding readers that from November 4, 1805 to March 25, 1806, “there were not more than twelve days in which it did not rain, and of these but six were clear.” His mention of the men’s “rheumatick pains” links present hardship to past exposure — a narrative move neither captain makes.
Clark’s account is the most dramatic in its opening. He alone gives the gale a sound:
This morning about day light I heard a Considerable roreing like wind at a distance and in the Course of a Short time ways rose very high which appeared to come across the river…
Clark also alone records material damage — “one of them Split before we Could get it out” — and pauses to credit John Shields, who reworked his small rifle: “the party ows much to the injenuity of this man, by whome their guns are repared when they get out of order which is very often.” This is characteristic Clark: attentive to the human machinery of the corps.
Lewis the Botanist, Clark the Ethnographer
The most revealing contrast lies in how the two captains spend their forced leisure. Lewis takes a three-mile walk and uses it to correct an earlier misidentification of a thorny shrub, producing a full Linnaean description — “this bryer is of the class Polyandria and order Polygynia,” with its “five accute pale scarlet petals, insirted in the recepticle with a short and narrow claw.” The technical vocabulary (perianth, peduncle, subulate filaments, imbricated germ) shows Lewis treating the windbound day as scientific opportunity. Neither Gass nor Ordway notes any such walk; Clark mentions no plants at all.
Clark, instead, turns his attention to the people around the camp. He records a careful medical observation about eye disease among the river nations:
the loss of Sight I have observed to be more Common among all the nations inhabiting this river than among any people I ever observed. they have almost invariably Sore eyes at all Stages of life.
His tentative etiology — “their exposure to the reflection of the Sun on the water” during fishing — is the kind of inference Lewis reserves for plants and animals. Clark also singles out an arriving woman with “a very round head and pierceing black eyes,” noting her appearance differs from others on the river.
The Pilfering Incident: A Test of Sources
Both captains describe a nighttime intrusion, and the small discrepancies between their accounts are instructive. Lewis writes that “late at night the centinel detected an old indian man in attempting to creep into camp in order to pilfer” and that the sentinel “gave the fellow a few stripes with a switch and sent him off.” Clark places the episode earlier — “in the evening late an old man his Son & Grand Son and their Wives &c. Came down” — and specifies the offense: “the Old man was detected in Stealing a Spoon and he was ordered away.” Lewis says the man’s party of six “departed soon after”; Clark says they camped 200 yards below and “did not return to our fires after.”
The two captains are clearly not copying one another here. Lewis omits the spoon; Clark omits the switching. Gass and Ordway omit the incident entirely — a reminder that the enlisted journalists, whatever their access to the captains’ notes, did not mechanically transcribe them. Together the four entries offer a useful demonstration of how a single windbound day on the Columbia generates four overlapping but independently shaped records.
