Stalled at Weippe Prairie waiting for Nez Perce guides who could lead them across the Bitterroots, the Corps of Discovery spent June 19, 1806 hunting, fishing, and tallying their dwindling resources. Four journal-keepers — Patrick Gass, John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis — recorded the day, and the convergences and divergences among their entries offer a useful case study in how the expedition’s documentary record was assembled.
The Salmon-Trout Disappointment
All four narrators record the same small drama: men were dispatched with Indian bone gigs to take fish from the creek, and after a day’s effort, only a single specimen was landed. Gass reports it tersely:
In the evening one of the large fish was caught, which we found to be a salmon-trout.
Ordway adds the fisherman’s name and a verdict on quality:
Gibson giged & killd one of the fish we took to be Salmon and we found it to be Salmon trout, and poor, we expect they all are that is in this creek
Clark expands the same event into natural-historical observation, noting the fish was
of the common Size pore, and indifferently flavoured
and describing how the surviving trout sheltered under undercut banks beyond the reach of gigs and spears. Lewis goes further still, naming the species type (
these trout are of the red kind they remain all winter in the upper parts of the rivers and creeks and are generally poor at this season
) and registering the captains’ emotional stake — they had hoped for the spring salmon run, and the salmon-trout came "much to our mortification." The pattern is characteristic: the sergeants log the fact, Clark contextualizes it geographically, and Lewis supplies the taxonomic and affective frame.
Lost Horses and the Logistics of Delay
The return of Shields and LaPage without the missing horses is reported by every narrator, but with different scope. Gass mentions only that the two men "had not found them." Ordway names Shields. Clark identifies all four returning men — Joseph and Reubin Fields, Shields, and LaPage — and credits Reubin Fields with the two deer brought in from Hungry Creek. Lewis adds a fresh complication that none of the others record: late in the evening Frazier reported that Lewis’s own riding horse, Clark’s horse, and a mule had wandered back toward the Quamash flats, their tracks pursued for two and a half miles down the road.
Lewis’s exclusive notice of the strayed mounts is consequential, because it shapes the contingency plan he then articulates: send all hunters out in the morning to test whether the camp can feed itself, and if not, fall back to Quamash flats the day after. Clark, writing the same day, frames the decision differently — as a deliberate one-day delay to allow the two young Nez Perce chiefs to overtake them, sparing the party
two days march through some of the worst road through those Mountains, crouded with fallin timber mud holes and steep hills &c.
The two captains, evidently in conference, emphasize different rationales for the same choice.
Details One Narrator Catches
Several observations appear in only one journal. Lewis alone describes repairing the broken Indian bone gigs by cutting a piece of iron from his pouch into two replacement points — a small act of improvisation that survives only because he chose to record it. He alone also reports Cruzatte bringing him morels, which he roasted and ate plain:
in this way I had for the first time the true taist of the morell which is truly an insippid taistless food.
And Lewis alone tracks the salt inventory, noting only two quarts remained, reserved for his planned reconnaissance up Maria’s River.
Clark alone supplies the day’s botanical and topographic survey from his four-mile walk up the creek: abundant grass sufficient to sustain the horses indefinitely, "Several glades of quawmash," and the contrast between the burnt and fallen timber on southwest-facing slopes and the lofty pine with thick undergrowth on the northeast aspects. Where Lewis turns inward toward provisions and taste, Clark turns outward toward landscape.
Gass and Ordway, the sergeants, produce the most compressed accounts, and their entries align closely in sequence and content — both note the morning hunt, the noon arrival of the back party, Labiche’s deer, and the single salmon-trout. Ordway adds one detail Gass omits but Lewis and Clark also flag:
the Musquetoes are verry troublesome.
On this small point, the enlisted journalist and the captains converge in shared misery.
