The journal entries for May 30, 1806, written from Camp Chopunnish on the Clearwater River, offer an unusually clean opportunity to compare how four members of the Lewis and Clark expedition represented a shared day. The captains were waiting for the Bitterroot snows to melt before recrossing the mountains, and the day’s central event — the swamping of a canoe carrying Shannon, Collins, and Potts — appears in all four accounts. Yet the same incident yields four distinct documentary registers.
The Captains in Near-Lockstep
The Lewis and Clark entries for this date are virtually identical in structure, sequence, and phrasing — a reminder that during the return journey the two captains often shared field notes or copied from one another. Compare Clark’s report of the accident:
on landing on the opposit Shore the Canoe was driven broad Side with the full force of a very Strong Current against Some Standing trees and instantly filled with water and Sunk. Potts who was with them is an indifferent Swimer, it was with dificuelty he made the land. they lost three blankets and a Blanket Cappo and their pittance of Merchindize. in our bear State of Clothing this was a Serious loss.
with Lewis’s:
in landing on the opposite shore the canoe was driven broad side with the full forse of a very strong current against some standing trees and instantly filled with water and sunk. Potts who was with them is an indifferent swimer, it was with much difficulty he made the land. they lost three blankets a blanket coat and their pittance of merchandize. in our bear state of clootheing this was a serious loss.
The differences are almost entirely orthographic — Clark’s “Cappo” for Lewis’s “blanket coat,” Clark’s “dificuelty” for Lewis’s “difficulty.” Both captains then move through the same ordered topics: Pryor’s failed salvage attempt, the recovery of the invalids, the sweat administered to the sick Chief, Joseph Field’s return, and a long natural-history catalogue of reptiles and amphibians. The captains’ shared paragraph on a frog whose body is “covered with little pustles or lumps” appears nearly verbatim in both journals. Whatever the exact mechanism of transmission, the pair functioned as a single editorial voice on this day.
Gass: The Plain Accounting
Sergeant Patrick Gass, whose published journal favored brevity, registers the same accident with very different emphasis. Where the captains foreground command decisions (sending Pryor, permitting Shannon and Collins to cross), Gass treats the event as a problem of supply equity:
The loss of these blankets is the greatest which hath happened to any individuals since we began our voyage, as there are only three men in the party, who have more than a blanket apiece.
This is a detail neither Lewis nor Clark records. The captains call the loss “a Serious loss” in the abstract; Gass quantifies what “bear State of Clothing” actually meant for the enlisted men in late May at 4,000 feet. He also notes — where the captains do not — that the river “is so high that the trees stand some distance in the water,” supplying the physical cause of the accident the captains describe only by its effect.
Ordway: The Ethnographic Eye
Sergeant John Ordway’s entry for the day diverges most sharply from the others. He does not mention the canoe accident at all. Instead, his attention rests on Nez Perce fishing:
the natives roasted an other Salmon & Set before us to eat. in the afternoon we purchased as many Salmon as we thought was necessary to take home and hung them up the most they catch is on the opposite shore along the rocks in the whorls & eddys. we Saw only three dip nets at 3 places a fishing.
Ordway records what the captains’ entries omit entirely: the day’s hospitality, the expedition’s salmon procurement, and a careful observation about where and with what gear the Nez Perce were taking fish. His count — three dip nets at three places — is the kind of empirical detail that neither captain bothers to capture, perhaps because their natural-history paragraphs were already drafted around reptiles and frogs.
Patterns of Witness
Read together, the four entries demonstrate a recurring pattern in the late expedition record. Lewis and Clark function as a coordinated command journal, attentive to personnel, medical progress (the recovering Chief, the invalids), and natural-history compilation. Gass writes from the ranks, foregrounding material conditions — blankets per man, the swollen river — that the captains either generalize or omit. Ordway, characteristically, supplies the ethnographic and subsistence detail that rounds out the day. No single narrator captures the whole; the canoe accident, the sick chief, the salmon trade, and the dip nets in the eddies belong to different observers, and only the composite yields the day at Camp Chopunnish in full.
