The entries for October 19, 1805 capture the expedition’s encampment near the mouth of the Walla Walla River, where the captains held council with the Walla Walla chief Yelleppit before pushing downriver through dangerous rapids. The three surviving narrators — William Clark, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway — produce strikingly different records of the same hours, revealing how rank, literary ambition, and the eventual editing of journals shaped the expedition’s documentary archive.
Clark’s Diplomatic Portrait
Clark devotes the bulk of his entry to the morning council. He names the principal chief — “Yel-lep-pit” — and offers an unusually warm physical description:
Yelleppit is a bold handsom Indian, with a dignified countenance about 35 years of age, about 5 feet 8 inches high and well perpotiond.
Clark records the specific gifts distributed (a medal, handkerchief, and wampum to Yelleppit; wampum strings to the second and third chiefs) and notes the chief’s request that the party remain until midday so his people could come down to see them. The captains declined but promised to stay one or two days on the return journey — a promise Clark emphasizes “appeared to Satisfy him.” Clark also captures a striking scene of cultural exchange in his field notes:
P. Crusat played on the Violin which pleasd and astonished those reches who are badly Clad, 3/4 with robes not half large enough to cover them.
Pierre Cruzatte’s fiddle is a recurring expedition motif, but only Clark records its use here. Neither Gass nor Ordway mentions the music, the violin, or the supper of crane Clark notes in his more personal field-note version.
Gass’s Ethnographic Eye
Gass — writing in the polished prose that reflects his journal’s later editorial reworking by David McKeehan — compresses the council into a single sentence: “our Commanding Officers presented one of them with a medal and other small articles.” He does not name Yelleppit. What interests Gass instead is mortuary practice. Where Clark counts wampum strings, Gass records a custom neither captain mentions on this date:
The custom prevails among these Indians of burying all the property of the deceased, with the body… his baskets, bags, clothing, horses and other property are all interred : even his canoe is split into pieces and set up round his grave.
This is classic Gass: where the captains attend to diplomacy and geography, the sergeant attends to material culture and custom. He also offers the day’s only mileage figure (36 miles) and the only tally of visiting canoes (“about thirty-six canoe loads”), both quantitative details consistent with his role as an enlisted observer keeping a workmanlike log.
The Ordway Anomaly
Ordway’s entry for October 19 is genuinely puzzling. While Clark and Gass place the party on the Columbia near the Walla Walla confluence, Ordway describes “high towers of rocks Standing out in the edge of the ocean,” a march along “the Sand beach about 10 miles distant from Cape dissipointment,” and a camp “at Chineck River in Hailys bay.” These are coastal Pacific landmarks the expedition would not reach until mid-November.
The most likely explanation is a transcription or dating error in the surviving Ordway manuscript — either Ordway later interleaved a November coastal excursion under an October header, or a copyist misaligned the dates. The entry’s content corresponds closely to the salt-camp and Cape Disappointment reconnaissance of late November 1805. For researchers using Ordway as a corroborating source for the inland Columbia passage, this entry is a cautionary case: not every dated entry reflects the events of that calendar day.
Cross-Narrator Patterns
Three patterns emerge. First, Clark alone preserves Indigenous names and individuated description; Gass and Ordway record Native peoples generically. Second, Gass — though briefer — captures ethnographic detail (burial customs, lodging comparisons to “those at the forks above”) that the captains, preoccupied with the rapids ahead, omit. Third, register differs sharply: Clark’s field notes are immediate and personal (“I Suped on the Crane which I killed to day”), his fair-copy entry more formal, Gass’s prose smoothed by post-expedition editing, and Ordway’s — at least in this instance — apparently dislocated from its proper date. Read together, the three narrators offer not a unified record but a layered one, in which each silence and each surplus detail tells the researcher something about how the expedition was witnessed and remembered.
This analysis was AI-assisted and reviewed by a human editor.
