The journal entries dated June 1, 1806 offer an unusual structural puzzle for readers of the expedition record. Three of the four narrators — Lewis, Clark, and Gass — are physically together at Camp Chopunnish on the Clearwater, awaiting the melting of snow in the Bitterroot passes. The fourth, Sergeant John Ordway, is many miles away on a salmon-procurement detail and will not rejoin the main party for several days. His entry for this date, written in the field, sits beside theirs in the published record but belongs to a separate narrative thread that the captains themselves are anxiously tracking.
Lewis and Clark: Near-Identical Twins
The captains’ entries for this day are among the clearest demonstrations in the journals of their habit of mutual copying. Lewis writes of Charbonneau and LaPage’s failed trading expedition:
Yesterday evening Charbono an LaPage returned, having made a broken voyage. they ascended the river on this side nearly opposite to a village eight miles above us, here their led horse which had on him their merchandize, feell into the river from the side of a steep clift and swam over.
Clark’s version is virtually word-for-word, with predictable orthographic variants (“Shabono” for “Charbono,” “opposit” for “opposite,” “Clift” capitalized) and one telling substitution: where Lewis writes that the tomahawk “was stolen from us while we lay at the forks,” Clark personalizes it — “the other was stolen from me whilst we lay at the forks.” Similarly, Lewis records the pipe tomahawk as one “which Capt. C. left at our camp on Musquetoe Creek,” while Clark reverses the attribution: “a pipe tomahawk which Capt L. left at our Camp on Musquetor Creek.” These small inversions suggest each captain adapted shared language to his own perspective rather than transcribing mechanically. Clark also renders the Kooskooske as “Flat Head river” — a regional gloss Lewis omits.
Where the two diverge sharply is in Lewis’s lengthy botanical appendix. After the shared narrative of trade misadventures, lost tomahawks, and the absent Twisted Hair, Lewis turns to a flowering plant he has collected:
I met with a singular plant today in blume of which I preserved a specemine; it grows on the steep sides of the fertile hills near this place, the radix is fibrous, not much branched, annual, woody, white and nearly smooth.
The taxonomic register — radix, calyx, corolla superior, four pale perple petals — is entirely Lewis’s. Clark omits the plant altogether. This is the standard pattern of the late expedition: shared logistical narrative, divergent specialist observation.
Gass: The Detail the Captains Miss
Sergeant Patrick Gass’s entry is brief — a paragraph against Lewis’s page — but it preserves an ethnographic and zoological detail the captains pass over in silence on this date. Gass records:
The officers got some bear skins from the Indians, that are almost as white as a blanket. They say that the bears from which they get these skins are a harmless kind, and not so bold and ferocious as the. grizly and brown bear.
The acquisition of these unusually pale bear skins, and the Nez Perce informants’ classification of bear types by temperament rather than color alone, is exactly the sort of cross-cultural natural-history note one might expect Lewis to seize upon. Yet on June 1 Lewis is preoccupied with his unidentified flower, and Clark with the day’s logistical setbacks. Gass also notes the river’s eighteen-inch overnight rise — a hydrological data point absent from the captains’ versions, though directly relevant to their travel planning. His shorter entries frequently capture exactly such practical specifics.
Ordway: A Voice from Elsewhere
The Ordway entry assigned to this date belongs to a different geography entirely. While Lewis writes that “we begin to feel some anxiety with rispect to Sergt. Ordway and party who were sent to Lewis’s river for salmon; we have received no inteligence of them since they set out,” Ordway himself is moving through Nez Perce country toward the forks of the Kooskooskee, trading for food and observing horse markets:
their is a vast site of excellent horses Scattered along this river which they offer to Sell for a Squaw axe pr peace & 2 or 3 for a gun & a little ammun’
His tone is the steady field diary of a non-commissioned officer: route, distances, lodges passed, hospitality received from “the chiefs lodge that gave us so many horses.” The juxtaposition is poignant. The captains record their worry about him; he, unaware of their concern, records the friendliness of his hosts and the abundance of horseflesh. Only when the parties reunite will these two narrative streams converge — and the editors’ decision to print Ordway’s June 1 entry alongside the captains’ anxious mention of him is itself a piece of retrospective ordering, not a same-day exchange.
Read together, the four entries demonstrate the layered nature of the expedition record: a shared captains’ draft, a sergeant’s terser corrective, and a distant field diary stitched into the chronology after the fact.
