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 launch on the Clearwater and covers October 14 to November 2, 1805: down the Snake to the Columbia, past the Great Falls, the two narrows and the Cascades, to the point where the tide reaches up the river.

On the morning of October 24, 1805, at the camp below the Great Falls, the local people approached with great caution.

The two old Nez Perce chiefs who had come all the way down the river with the expedition said they were going home.

Their nation, they said, reached no farther down the river than these falls, and they could be of no further service. The nation below had shown hostile intentions toward the expedition, and had been at war with their own people. It would certainly kill them.

They were anxious, they added, to go back and see the expedition's horses. Those were the thirty-eight horses branded on the Clearwater less than three weeks before and left in Nez Perce care.

The captains asked them to stay two more nights.

That same morning Clark meant to take the canoes into a channel only forty-five yards wide.

Two Hundred Men Singing

The two old chiefs were Twisted Hair and Tetoharsky, who had come aboard on the Clearwater.

On October 14 the party was still on the Snake. A canoe steered by Drouillard struck a rock, swung round and sank. The men climbed onto the rock and held her. Bedding, shot pouches and tomahawks were lost; two canisters of loose powder, the roots prepared in the Indian way and half the goods were soaked. One of the chiefs had been in that canoe. He swam in and saved some of the property.

The next day the two chiefs, with three local men who had piloted the canoes through the rapids, went ahead and waited above the next rapid to warn the party how hard it was.

Toward evening on October 16 the canoes reached the place where the Snake meets the Columbia, near present-day Pasco, Washington. The chiefs had arrived first and told the people there that the strangers were coming and meant no harm to any nation.

The fires were barely lit when a chief came down from the camp upriver at the head of about two hundred men. They sang, beat time with sticks on their drums, formed a half circle around the camp and sang for some time.

The captains passed the pipe, explained by signs why they had come, and gave the chiefs medals. The journals' editors identify the people here chiefly as Yakamas and Wanapams, whose languages belong to the same family as Nez Perce. That, the editors suggest, is probably why the two old chiefs were so useful here.

On October 17 Clark took two men in a small canoe ten miles up the Columbia. The water was so clear that salmon could be seen fifteen or twenty feet down. Dead fish lay along the shores and floated on the river; he reckoned he saw three or four hundred.

He entered a mat lodge crowded with men, women and children. Someone gave him a mat to sit on. A man split a piece of driftwood with an elk-horn wedge and a curiously carved stone mallet, made a fire and heated round stones. A woman handed him a basket of water and a large, half-dried salmon. The man dropped the hot stones into the basket, the water boiled, and the fish was soon cooked.

In one of the lodges he entered, Clark saw an old woman who was entirely blind. She had lived, he was told by signs, more than a hundred winters. She had the best place in the house, and when she spoke, everyone listened.

On the afternoon of October 18 the captains held another council, their words carried by signs through the two old chiefs, and then took the chiefs into the canoes and started down the Columbia.

People from the Clouds

Early on October 19 a great chief named Yelleppit came to see them. Clark called him a bold, handsome man with a dignified face, about thirty-five. He asked the captains to stay until midday so that his people could come and see them. They excused themselves and promised to stay a day or two with him on their way back.

Farther down, as the canoes passed an island, its people hid in their lodges and did not come out until the boats had gone by.

At the head of a long rapid Clark went ashore to walk, with the two chiefs, the interpreter Charbonneau and his wife Sacagawea, while the others took the canoes down. He waited on a rock at the foot of the rapid for about two hours, watching the men on the far side get into the water and haul the canoes over the shoals.

While he waited he shot a crane that was flying over.

A few people standing on a knob across the river turned and ran back to their lodges as fast as they could. Afraid they had not been told who the strangers were, Clark took three men in the small canoe and crossed over.

The doors of the five lodges were closed with mats. Apart from three men far off on the plain, no one was in sight. Pipe in hand, Clark went into the nearest lodge. Thirty-two people were inside, men, women and a few children, in the greatest agitation. Some were crying and wringing their hands; others hung their heads.

He gave his hand to each of them, made signs of friendship, offered the men his pipe and handed round the small articles in his pockets. That calmed them a little. He sent a man into each of the other lodges and went into a second himself, where the people were even more frightened.

Afterward he sat down on a rock and made signs for the men to come out and smoke. Not one came. Only when the canoes arrived with the two chiefs, and one of them spoke aloud, as was their custom, did the people come out and sit down with Clark to smoke.

They said the strangers had come from the clouds and were not men. Clark does not say why they thought so.

Then Lewis came down with the canoes. As soon as the people saw Sacagawea, they pointed to her and called to those still hiding. Everyone came out at once, and, Clark wrote, they seemed to take on new life.

Clark's explanation was simple: in this country no woman ever went along with a war party.

The old chief told them who the strangers were, where they had come from and where they were going, and gave a friendly account of them. That night about a hundred people came to the camp, some bringing wood. Cruzatte and Gibson played the fiddle, and the visitors were delighted.

A Wall of Salmon

The farther they went, the less wood there was. On the morning of October 21 they could not even gather enough to cook breakfast and had to buy it from the people on the bank.

Everyone along the river used one word for the great falls below: "Timm." Clark understood that the people lived on the north bank for fear of the "Snake Indians" on a large river to the south. One of the old chiefs pointed to a place on the south side where, not many years before, the two sides had fought a great battle with many killed.

That evening Private Collins produced something unexpected: beer, made from root bread that had gone moldy and sour. Clark called it very good. The bread was what was left of the provisions bought from the Nez Perce a month earlier.

Around noon on October 22 they reached the Great Falls. Today they are known as Celilo Falls. In Sahaptin they were Wy-am, which the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission explains as "echo of falling water" or "sound of water upon the rocks."

There were seventeen lodges on the north bank above the falls. An old man walked down with the captains to show them the falls and the best way around. The portage ran along the north bank for 1,200 yards, a third of it over rock, two hundred yards across loose, wind-blown sand.

The local people carried the heavy baggage across on their horses. Ordway and Whitehouse record that the captains hired the horses.

What Clark studied most closely were the stacks of salmon on the rocky islands and around the lodges. The dried fish was pounded fine between two stones and packed into baskets of grass and rushes, each lined with a stretched and dried salmon skin. The fish was pressed down as hard as possible and the top sealed with more skins. Each basket weighed ninety to a hundred pounds. Seven were set close together, five more on top, and the whole wrapped in mats and tied: one stack.

Fish kept this way, the people told him, stayed sound for several years. Great quantities were sold to the white people who came to the mouth of the river, and to the people below.

Clark placed the camp where the stores could be guarded. They feared theft, he wrote, more than arrows.

On October 23 Clark took most of the men and the canoes across to the south side; Gass says the local people told them that was the best side. They dragged the canoes 457 yards over the rocks and let them down an eight-foot pitch with strong elk-skin ropes. A rope broke and one canoe shot away downstream, where local people caught it. The party had to pay for its return.

People had camped at the head of the portage not long before, and the straw and fish skins were alive with fleas. Every man had to strip naked while hauling the canoes so he could brush them off.

That day one of the old chiefs heard people say that the nation below meant to kill the party. The captains had every gun examined and brought the ammunition up to a hundred rounds. The visitors left earlier than usual that evening, which, Clark thought, gave some confirmation to the old chief's warning.

Lewis traded the expedition's smallest canoe, with a hatchet and a few trinkets, for one of a different kind: wide in the middle, tapering at each end, carved with figures on the bow, and made to ride the waves. Its owner said he had bought it from a white man downriver for a horse.

That evening, Clark noted, the two old chiefs seemed very uneasy.

Forty-Five Yards

On the morning of October 24 the two old chiefs agreed to stay two more nights. Clark was frank about why: the captains wanted them along to learn what the people at the next rapids intended, and if possible to make peace between them and the nations below.

At nine Clark set out with the canoes. After two and a half miles the river opened into a wide basin, and a high, steep black rock rose ahead as if to block it. From beyond the rock came a great roaring.

He landed, and local people went with him to the top. Below, the whole river was squeezed between two rocks into a channel no more than forty-five yards wide. It ran that way for a quarter of a mile before widening to two hundred yards.

Carrying the big canoes over that rock was beyond their strength. The only danger, Clark judged, was the whirls and swells thrown up by the compressed water, and with good steering they could get through. Cruzatte, their best waterman, thought so too.

Clark later wrote of the water "Swelling, boiling & whorling in every direction," horrid to look at, and worse once you were in it than it had seemed from the top of the rock.

The canoes went through safely. The people watching from the top of the rock were astonished.

Not far below, two rocky islands split the current in another bad place. Clark sent everyone who could not swim overland with the papers, guns and ammunition, and took the canoes down two at a time to a village of twenty wooden houses. This was near today's Horsethief Lake State Park in Washington, at the head of the Long Narrows. The Short Narrows above and the Long Narrows below together make up The Dalles of the Columbia.

A man in the village invited Clark into his house. These were, Clark wrote, the first wooden houses he had seen Indians living in since leaving the country near the Illinois. They were sunk partly into the ground and roofed with cedar bark, with a door only twenty-nine and a half inches high, raised eighteen inches above the ground. Half of each house was packed with dried and pounded fish; the other half was home to about three families. On the rocks nearby he counted 107 stacks of fish.

That evening the principal chief of the nation below came with several of his men. The captains seized the chance to make peace between him and the two old chiefs. They had, Clark wrote, "every reason to believe" the two peoples would be on friendly terms from then on.

Cruzatte played the fiddle again, the men danced, and everyone smoked together until late at night.

The Old Chiefs Go Home

On October 25 the Long Narrows lay ahead. The captains first walked down to see the place the local people pointed out as the worst. A portage with the big canoes was impossible, so they decided to carry the most valuable articles a mile overland and run the canoes through.

Clark posted men along the channel with ropes to throw to anyone in trouble. Once again the high rocks were crowded with watching people.

The first three canoes went through well. The fourth nearly filled with water. The last took in only a little. Clark wrote that he felt "extreamly gratified and pleased."

Less than two miles on, the canoe that had nearly filled struck a rock hard and came close to being lost.

Where the current slackened, they found the two old chiefs again. They had been to a village below to smoke a friendly pipe. The chief of the village above was there too, back from hunting and crossing the river with his men and horses. He was about fifty and wore a war jacket; Whitehouse says it was made of worked splints that would turn arrows. On his way, the chief said, he had met a war party of "Snake Indians" and fought them.

Then came a parting smoke with the two old chiefs, "our two faithful friends," as Clark called them. Each had bought a horse for two robes, meaning to ride home. Ordway writes that the captains settled with them. Whitehouse says they took their presents and left well pleased.

The two old chiefs rode back east. Since boarding the canoes on the Clearwater, they had been with the expedition for more than two weeks.

That night the party camped on a high point of rock at the mouth of a creek. It was, Clark wrote, a kind of natural fortification, easy to defend if the people below did attack. They later called it Rock Fort Camp. It lies in the town of The Dalles, Oregon.

Two Languages Six Miles Apart

For the next three days they stayed at Rock Fort Camp, repairing the canoes and drying their goods. Dragged over rocks and knocked against more, the canoes were leaking badly and had to be pitched with resin. Many of the stores, soaked again and again, were ruined.

On the evening of October 26 the two principal chiefs of the falls and the country above came across with fifteen men, all in one small canoe. They had been out hunting when the expedition passed their villages. One gave the captains deer meat and small cakes of white root bread. The captains gave them medals, red silk handkerchiefs and knives, and acknowledged them as chiefs. Clark spelled out the purpose: to treat them well now, so as to be sure of a friendly reception on the way home.

That night Cruzatte played and York danced for the guests.

Clark noted something puzzling, too. The river rose nearly eight inches in a day, as if with a tide. But with falls below, the tide could not reach this far. He guessed the wind, which had blown upriver for twenty-four hours, had pushed the water up.

October 27 was windy. The captains took down words from the two chiefs. The people at the Great Falls called themselves Eneeshur; the people at the Narrows called themselves Echelute. Their villages were only six miles apart, yet their languages were very different. The falls people were understood upriver; the Narrows people were understood below.

The National Park Service describes Celilo Falls as a rough boundary between two language families: Sahaptian to the east as far as the Rockies, Chinookan to the west as far as the Pacific.

The old chiefs had said their nation reached no farther than the falls. The expedition was now in the country of another language.

On October 28 canoes came from the villages above and below to look at them. One man wore his hair in a queue, with a round hat and a jacket. In a house in a village a little downriver, Clark saw a British musket, a cutlass and several brass tea kettles.

Then the wind rose, and the party had to lie by on shore all day. The local canoes kept coming and going. Their canoes, Clark wrote, were built to ride the highest waves.

The Great Shute

On October 30 it rained, and it was cold. The river suddenly looked like a pond half drained, with pine stumps standing in the water and a current of no more than a mile and a half an hour. Clark could not understand what seemed to be damming the river below.

In the evening they camped on a small island at the head of the Great Shute. Clark took two men three miles down an old Indian path and came back to report that most of the baggage would have to be carried two and a half miles, while the canoes could be hauled over the rocks.

On October 31 he went to look again. The Great Shute ran for about half a mile, the whole river compressed into 150 paces and full of rocks, with a fall of about twenty feet. The old path was the one the local people used for their own portage. He walked on until no more rapids were in sight and saw a lone rock about eight hundred feet high. They called it Beaten Rock; today it is Beacon Rock. Below it the river widened and seemed already to feel the tide.

Back at camp, two canoes from a village at the mouth of the Klickitat River came in, loaded with fish and beargrass for trade downriver. Their owners unloaded, turned the canoes over on the beach and spent the night under an overhanging rock.

One of the men shot a goose that drifted toward the rapids. A local man saw it, plunged in, swam out and brought it ashore. He had richly earned it, Clark said, and let him keep it.

Early on November 1 a cold wind blew hard. The people who had arrived the evening before carried their canoes on their shoulders to the foot of the Great Shute. They carried their loads the whole two and a half miles to avoid a second shute below, and then ran that shute in their empty canoes.

The party carried its baggage 940 yards over slippery, rocky ground, then laid poles from rock to rock and slid the four big canoes down them one by one. Three were damaged and had to be repaired.

Ordway wrote that people taking canoe-loads of pounded salmon downriver to trade were carrying their loads and canoes over the portage alongside the expedition. Whitehouse says they made signs that they were going down to trade the fish for blue beads.

Clark could not be sure whether these people traded with white men directly or with Indians who traded with them. He believed it was mostly the latter. He did trace where the beads went: the blue and white beads bought here were carried farther upriver for robes, skins, root bread and beargrass, and the people there traded in turn with those living under the Rocky Mountains.

Epilogue

On the morning of November 2 one more rapid lay below. Clark looked it over and judged it too dangerous to run with loaded canoes. Those who could not swim carried the baggage overland, and he walked with them to the end of the portage, waiting until every article was across and the canoes were safely down.

As they were about to set out, seven women came over the portage carrying dried fish and beargrass, neatly bundled. Soon after, four local men came down over the rapid in a large canoe.

This, Ordway wrote, was the last bad rapid the local people had told them of.

Below Beacon Rock the river widened to nearly two miles and ran smooth and gentle. Swans, geese and ducks covered the water. The tide, Clark wrote, made itself felt as high as Beacon Rock and the last rapids.

That night they camped under a projecting rock on the south bank. Seven people in a canoe on their way down to trade camped with them. The people they had left at the portage that morning passed them in the evening.

Here, Clark noted, the tide rose about nine inches, and he thought the full flood must rise much higher.

Nine days earlier the old chiefs had said they could go no farther than the falls. Now the expedition was traveling with people of another language, on the same road, carrying fish toward the sea.

Sources, Editions and Boundaries

1. Primary source: Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983–2001). Clark's entries for October 14 to November 1, 1805 are in vol. 5 (July 28–November 1, 1805) and his November 2 entry in vol. 6 (November 2, 1805–March 22, 1806); Ordway is in vol. 9, Gass in vol. 10, Whitehouse in vol. 11. Read day by day in the edition's UNL digital version, October 14 to November 2, 1805 (20 entries, usually two Clark entries a day), with the same-day accounts of Ordway, Gass and Whitehouse (rough and fair copies) and the editorial notes: https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.jrn.1805-10-14 through https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.jrn.1805-11-02 (the address changes with the date). Lewis kept no journal in this period; his actions here come from Clark's and the others' records. Weekday labels often disagree with the dates; this story follows the dates. 2. Comparison text only: Project Gutenberg 8419, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804–1806, Clark, October 14 to November 2, 1805, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8419/pg8419.txt (local copy sha256 e57f1eb6…). It is an electronic transcription that names no base text and omits some survey material, so it is used for comparison, not cited as a source; a few quoted phrases (such as "Singing and beeting" and "more fearfull of, than their arrows") appear only in the Moulton edition. Gass's text survives in an early edited published form. The identifications of the Yakama and Wanapam people, Celilo Falls, the Short and Long Narrows (The Dalles), Rock Fort Camp, the Cascades, Beacon Rock and the Klickitat River follow the Moulton editorial notes. 3. National Park Service: Celilo Falls Portage (updated November 27, 2020), for Celilo Falls as a social and commercial center of the Columbia River tribes, the Sahaptian–Chinookan language boundary and the villagers' horses on the portage: https://www.nps.gov/places/celilo-falls-portage.htm ; Rock Fort Campsite (updated November 27, 2020), for the camp's location in The Dalles and the three-night stay: https://www.nps.gov/places/rock-fort-campsite-or.htm . 4. Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (the Yakama, Warm Springs, Umatilla and Nez Perce treaty tribes), Celilo Falls, for the name Wy-am and its Sahaptin meaning: https://critfc.org/salmon-culture/tribal-salmon-culture/celilo-falls/ . The page also records that the falls went under water within hours after The Dalles Dam closed its gates on March 10, 1957; the UNL notes likewise say Celilo Falls and The Dalles are now inundated by The Dalles Dam, and the Cascades by Bonneville Dam. 5. Boundaries: the two old chiefs are identified as Twisted Hair and Tetoharsky from the editorial notes; the journals call them "our two chiefs" or "the old chiefs." "Snake Indians" is the term the party recorded; the UNL notes suggest the people meant here were Paiutes, not the Shoshones the party met at Lemhi, and the story keeps the term in quotation marks. "From the clouds" is Clark's report; he gives no reason, and the story does not guess at one. Sacagawea's effect is told through Clark's own explanation. Clark gives the Short Narrows as forty-five yards wide; Ordway says about twenty, and Whitehouse gives the Long Narrows the next day as about twenty-five. On the horses at Celilo, Clark says the people helped and Ordway and Whitehouse say the horses were hired; the story gives both. The "sea otters" of the journals were harbor seals (UNL notes) and are left out. When the chiefs speak of "our horses," the expedition's only horses were the herd left on the Clearwater, which the story names. Clark's two entries on the Eneeshur and Echelute languages differ slightly (one says they shared few words, the other that many words were the same); the story keeps only what both say, that the languages were very different. "More than two weeks" counts from the chiefs' boarding on October 8 to the parting on October 25. On the Long Narrows run of October 25, Clark's first entry has the third canoe nearly filling and the second has the fourth; the story follows the second. Beaten Rock is Beacon Rock; its height is Clark's estimate. The Klickitat River is Clark's Cataract River, per the UNL notes. Modern places are regional map references; the camps of October 20–21 and 28–29 and of November 2 are not mapped. No dialogue, inner thoughts or weather have been invented. Indigenous words and actions reach us mostly through outsiders' records, and carry the writers' biases. 6. The journals are in the public domain. Both language versions are original adaptations; modern research and annotation are not copied at length.