An AI-assisted contemporary historical narrative by Clio Walker, based on the expedition journals and checked sources. It is not the captains' own text or a submission by either of them. This new episode follows on from the reunion at Weippe Prairie and covers the building of canoes on the Clearwater, the horses left in Nez Perce care, the change of guides and the first days downriver, September 23–October 10, 1805.

At dark on October 9, 1805, word came that the old guide and his son were gone.

They had been seen running up the river and were already several miles away.

Clark could not understand it. The old man had led them all the way from the Shoshone country and over the Bitterroots. He had not been paid, and he had said nothing.

Clark asked the local chief to send a man on horseback after him, to bring him back for his pay. The chief advised against it. Even if the old man were paid, the chief's own people would take the goods from him before he got past their camps.

By then the expedition's canoes had been on the water for three days. The men now showing them the river were Nez Perce.

The Lodge of Pine Boughs

The story begins more than two weeks earlier. On September 22 the party had come down out of the Bitterroots half-starved. That evening the Nez Perce leader Twisted Hair drew the rivers beyond for Clark on a white elk skin.

The next day, September 23, the captains gathered the chiefs and principal men. There was no interpreter, so everything went by signs. The captains explained where they had come from, where they were going, and their wish for peace among all the nations. That, Clark wrote, "appeared to Satisfy them much."

They handed out medals, gave Twisted Hair a flag and a shirt, and left a flag and a handkerchief for the great chief, who was still away at war.

But no one brought food that day. The captains bought what they could with their small trade goods: dried roots, root bread, raw roots, red haws and fish, until their weak horses could carry no more.

Private Whitehouse noticed copper kettles, beads and a few knives in the village. The people said they had them from traders to the west, and Whitehouse guessed the goods had come in from the western ocean. Large blue beads were what they wanted most. For a piece of red cloth as wide as a man's hand, they would give twice as much salmon and bread as for anything else of the same value.

In the evening Twisted Hair invited the two captains to his lodge, "nothin more than Pine bushes & bark," Clark wrote, and served them broiled dried salmon. The women of the village were busy digging and drying roots, which lay in piles.

That night Lewis and two of the men were very sick. Clark's hip hurt badly too; the day before, a young horse had thrown him three times.

The Chief's Horse

On September 24 the whole party set out for the river. Lewis could scarcely stay on "a jentle horse which was furnishd by the Chief." Several men were so ill they had to lie down by the road for a while; others had to be put on horses.

At sunset they reached the island where Clark had first found Twisted Hair, and camped on a larger island a little below. The river was the Clearwater, in present-day Idaho, and the camp was near today's Orofino.

Whitehouse set down the captains' plan. If they could find timber for canoes nearby, "we may leave our horses in the care of a chief and go down by water to the ocean."

Early on September 25 Clark rode downriver with the chief and two young men to look for trees. At a place where two forks of about equal size met, they stopped for an hour. One of the young men took his gig and speared six fine salmon. Two were roasted, and they ate.

Two Nez Perce canoes came up the river, loaded with the belongings and provisions of two families. Clark looked them over: "long Stedy and without much rake."

On the way back, one of those canoes, with two men poling, left the forks at the same moment Clark did. They had to drag it through three rapids on the way, and still reached camp within fifteen minutes of him.

Clark had found good canoe timber in a narrow pine bottom on the south side. Back at camp he found Lewis very sick. The captains decided to move to where the best timber was.

Axes Too Small

On September 26 they made camp on the south bank opposite the forks. It became known as Canoe Camp, about five miles west of present Orofino, where the North Fork joins the Clearwater.

Clark had the axes handed out and fitted with handles and assigned the men their work. "Our axes are Small & badly Calculated to build Canoes of the large Pine," he wrote.

Two chiefs and their families followed and camped nearby. They had a great many horses.

On September 27 every man able to work went out in five parties to fell five big pines. Some fell sick at the work. Lewis was very sick, Clark wrote, and "nearly all the men Sick."

The old Shoshone guide kept busy. He sat making flint points for his arrows.

The food was salmon and roots, all bought from the Nez Perce, and the hunters mostly came back with nothing. To Sergeant Gass the fare did "not appear a suitable diet for us." Salt was running short, and without it the fish was poor and tasteless.

On September 28 an old man told them he had been to the white people's fort at the falls and got white beads there. "His Story was not beleved," Clark wrote, "as he Could explain nothing."

By September 30 the men were recovering a little, but they were still so weak, Whitehouse wrote, that the canoes came along slowly.

Burning Out the Pines

On October 1 there was fire in camp.

Sergeant Ordway wrote that they "built fires on Some of them to burn them out" and found that the logs burned very well. Gass gave the reason. Most of the men were still very weak, and "to save them from hard labour, we have adopted the Indian method of burning out the canoes."

The method was to build a small fire where the log was to be hollowed, chip out the charred wood, and burn again. The National Park Service says the Nez Perce taught it to them. In a 2001 interview, the Nez Perce elder Beatrice Miles said that what she had heard was that the local people helped Lewis and Clark hew out the logs for the canoes that went down to the ocean.

Food kept getting scarcer. On October 2 Clark sent Frazer and Goodrich back to the villages with a Nez Perce man and six horses to buy fish and roots. The hunters killed only a small prairie wolf. "Provisions all out," Clark wrote, so they killed one of their horses, to eat and to make soup for the sick.

They ate it, Ordway wrote, "as earnest as though it had been the best meat in the world." In Whitehouse's fair copy, the next day the men worked in much better spirits and the canoes were well along.

On October 4 a Nez Perce man helped himself to a piece of tobacco from their sack. Clark refused to let him have it and gave offense. That evening some of the men roasted and ate a fat dog they had gotten from the Nez Perce.

Thirty-Eight Horses

The canoes were nearly done. What about the horses?

On October 5 they rounded up every horse they had left, thirty-eight in all. They branded each one on the near fore shoulder with a stirrup iron, Ordway wrote, and cropped the forelock "So as we may know them at our return."

Clark delivered the horses to two brothers and a son of one of the chiefs, and gave each a knife and some small articles. They promised to look after the horses until the expedition came back. The chief himself meant to go down the river with them for a while. The modern editors of the journals identify him as Twisted Hair. Another chief, later recorded as Tetoharsky, agreed to come too.

Toward evening the first two canoes went into the water.

That night Lewis and Clark ate a supper of boiled roots and were so swollen that for several hours they could hardly breathe.

On the night of October 6 they dug a hole and buried their saddles. A canister of powder and a bag of balls went into the ground where Shields had cut the log for his canoe. By evening every canoe was finished. Clark spent the whole night with pains in his bowels and stomach, "certainly the effects of my diet."

In Whitehouse's fair copy, nearly all the sick had recovered, and "We are all in high spirits expecting we shall be able to descend the River tomorrow."

Into the Water

On October 7 all five canoes were in the water and loaded. Gass counted four large ones and one small one to scout ahead.

Just as they were about to leave, Clark found that both chiefs who had promised to come were missing. So was his pipe tomahawk.

Clark was still sick, but "obliged to attend every thing." At about three in the afternoon they pushed off. As the National Park Service notes, it was the first time since leaving the Ohio River in the fall of 1803 that they were traveling with the current.

The river was clear and fast, full of shoals. Clark wrote its name as Kos kos kee; today it is the Clearwater. That afternoon they ran ten dangerous rapids. Clark's canoe struck a rock in the third and sprang a leak. After about twenty miles they put in, unloaded and patched it.

The Nez Perce told them that the forks ahead were the last of the bad water until the great falls, ten days below. The white people, they said, lived at the falls.

On the morning of October 8 they buried two lead canisters of powder two feet four inches north of a dead-topped pine opposite their camp, and set out at nine. That day they ran fifteen rapids. At the foot of an island, the canoe Gass was steering struck a rock, swung around, struck another, split open and filled.

One man was thrown overboard, Whitehouse wrote, and only with difficulty got back to the canoe. Several of the men aboard could not swim. They hung on to the canoe where it was caught on the rocks. With the waves and rocks, even the swimmers had no chance on their own.

A Nez Perce man on the island saw them and came out in a small canoe to help, and the expedition's small canoe went too. Clark had another canoe unloaded and taken into the rapid, got everything ashore and towed the empty canoe in. Thompson was slightly hurt. Nearly everything was soaked, above all their small stock of trade goods.

Those people, Clark wrote, "appeared disposed to give us every assistance in their power dureing our distress." In the same passage he called them inclined to thieve, and posted two sentinels over the goods spread out to dry.

That same day, at a camp along the river, they found the two chiefs. After the ceremony of smoking, the chiefs came aboard. Gass wrote that they proposed to go with the party "until we should meet with white people."

The Old Guide Who Left Unpaid

On October 9 everyone stayed put to dry the baggage and repair the canoe. Sergeants Pryor and Gass, Joseph Field and Gibson fastened knees and strong pieces to her sides and bottom. By one o'clock she was finished, Clark wrote, "Stronger than ever."

Then, at dark, came the news that the old guide and his son had gone.

Later accounts call him Old Toby. He had guided them from the Shoshone country and along the snowbound trail over the Bitterroots. Two days earlier Whitehouse had noted that "the 2 Indians we came over the mount. with us" were still with the canoes.

Clark could not account for his leaving at this moment. Gass had a guess: "I suspect he was afraid of being cast away passing the rapids."

The chief advised them not to send after him. That evening some of the men played the fiddle and others danced, and the Nez Perce watching were delighted.

The guide from the Shoshone country was gone. In the canoes now sat Twisted Hair and Tetoharsky.

Epilogue

At seven on the morning of October 10 they set out. At a place they named Ragid Rapid, one canoe stuck on a rock, and it took an hour to get her off. Nez Perce on the bank caught oars and poles that the rapids had carried away.

There they met a man from the falls who said he had seen white people there and wanted to go with them.

At about five in the afternoon the canoes reached the mouth of a large river coming in from the south, some sixty miles below Canoe Camp. Clark wrote that this south fork was the same river they had been on with the Shoshone. He called it Lewis's River. Today it is the Snake.

The man from the falls caught up with them in a small canoe with his son, still meaning to come along.

Here two waters met in different colors. The south fork was "a greenish blue, the north as clear as cristial."

Clark noted one small thing more. The fare was very bad, nothing but roots and dried fish, and all the men had the advantage of him, since they all relished the dog meat bought from the Nez Perce.

Eighteen days earlier Twisted Hair had drawn this stretch on the white elk skin. From the fork near Canoe Camp to the large south fork where the Shoshone fished was "2 Sleeps." Beyond that lay a still larger river coming in from the northwest, and below it, the great falls.

The old guide had gone home upriver. The new guides were in the canoes, going down with them.

Sources, Editions and Boundaries

1. Read directly in Project Gutenberg 8419, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804–1806: Clark, September 21–30 and October 1–10, 1805 (two entries for most days). https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8419/pg8419.txt (local copy sha256 e57f1eb6…, the same edition used for episode 13). The electronic transcription keeps original spellings and omits some survey material. Lewis kept no journal in this period because of illness. Weekday labels often disagree with the dates; this story follows the dates. In the Gutenberg text the end of the October 6 entry carries over travel notes that belong to October 7; this story follows the UNL arrangement. 2. Checked day by day against the UNL Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, September 23 to October 10, 1805, including the same-day accounts of Ordway, Gass and Whitehouse (rough and fair copies) and the editorial notes: https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.jrn.1805-09-23 through https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.jrn.1805-10-10 (18 entries; the address changes with the date). Gass's text survives in an early edited published form. The identifications of Twisted Hair, Tetoharsky and Old Toby, and the modern locations of Canoe Camp and the October 7–9 camps, follow the UNL (Moulton) editorial notes. 3. National Park Service: Canoe Camp (place page, updated September 25, 2020), for the Nez Perce teaching the burning method, the thirty-eight branded and cropped horses, the saddles and powder cached at night, and the first downstream travel since the Ohio: https://www.nps.gov/places/canoe-camp.htm ; Nez Perce National Historical Park, Lewis and Clark – Canoe Camp (updated September 19, 2023): https://www.nps.gov/nepe/learn/historyculture/canoe-camp.htm ; Chief Twisted Hair (updated July 30, 2019), for Twisted Hair as Walamottinin, his help finding canoe timber and the care of the horses: https://www.nps.gov/articles/chief-twisted-hair.htm . 4. Nez Perce Tribe and University of Idaho, Nimíipuu L3, "Twisted Hair and Canoe Camp" (© Nez Perce Tribe 2002), including the transcript of elder Beatrice Miles interviewed by Josiah Pinkham in December 2001: https://cdil.lib.uidaho.edu/nimiipuu-l3/expedition/twisted-hair.html . 5. Boundaries: that the Nez Perce taught the burning method comes from the Park Service and Nez Perce Tribe pages; the journals say only "the Indian method" and do not say who taught it. Clark gives the horses to "2 brothers and one Son of one of the Chiefs"; Ordway and Whitehouse say the chief's two sons; this story follows Clark. Twisted Hair and Tetoharsky are identified from the editorial notes; Tetoharsky's name first appears in the journals in May 1806. On the October 8 wreck, Gass says the water was no more than waist deep while Whitehouse says even the swimmers could not have saved themselves; the story keeps what the accounts share. The Park Service place page has the party leaving "around noon" on October 7 and calls the trees "probably red cedar or possibly ponderosa pine"; this story follows the journals: three in the afternoon, and pine. Why the old guide left is known only through Clark's puzzlement and Gass's guess, and is told that way. "White people at the falls" is a Nez Perce report as Clark recorded it, not a fact. Clark notes the two powder canisters at the end of his October 7 entry; his two October 8 entries, Ordway and Whitehouse place the burial on the morning of October 8, and this story follows them. The five o'clock arrival at the forks on October 10 is Whitehouse's. Canoe Camp and the October 10 confluence are regional map references; the October 7–9 camps are not mapped. No dialogue, inner thoughts or weather have been invented. Indigenous words and actions reach us mostly through outsiders' records. 6. The journals are in the public domain. Both language versions are original adaptations; modern research and annotation are not copied at length.