By late May 1806 the Corps of Discovery had been encamped among the Nez Perce (Chopunnish) for nearly two weeks, waiting for the Bitterroot snowpack to melt enough to permit the eastward crossing. The journals of Lewis, Clark, Ordway, and Gass for May 22nd describe a single shared afternoon, but the four entries diverge sharply in emphasis — a useful demonstration of how multi-narrator coverage at Long Camp produces a richer record than any single voice could supply.
The Shared Spine: A Deer Driven into the River
All four narrators record the central spectacle of the day: a party of mounted Nez Perce chasing a deer down the bluffs opposite camp until it plunged into the river, where men of the Corps shot it and the Indians retrieved the carcass on a raft. The captains’ entries are nearly identical in wording, as is typical of their collaborative drafting. Clark writes that "at 3 P.M. we observed a number of Indians in chase of a deer on their horses on the opposit hill Sides," while Lewis records the same hour and adds that "Capt. C. Myself & three of our men shot and killed the deer in the water."
Ordway, writing independently, gives a slightly different account — that the Indians had already wounded the deer with arrows before it took to the water — a detail neither captain mentions. Gass, writing the next morning under a Friday 23rd dateline that conflates the previous afternoon’s events, dramatizes the horsemanship most vividly:
These Indians are the most active horsemen I ever saw: they will gallop their horses over precipices, that I should not think of riding over at all.
Lewis echoes the sentiment in plainer terms — "it is astonishing to see these people ride down those steep hills which they do at full speed" — but only Gass extends the observation into a sustained ethnographic passage on Nez Perce saddle construction, noting wooden frames "covered with raw skins, which when they become dry, bind every part tight," and identifying the high pommel-and-cantle design as Spanish-derived. This is a register difference characteristic of Gass: the carpenter-sergeant repeatedly attends to material craft where the captains record only the event.
What Each Narrator Notices Alone
Ordway alone provides the day’s most striking ethnographic set-piece: a detailed description of a Nez Perce sweat lodge. He records that about twelve men entered a hole "only a hole big enofe to git in one at a time," alternating sweating with bathing in the river for some two hours, and that his hosts "Signed to me that it was to help them of Some disease & Sore eyes." Ordway also makes the gendered labor observation — "the women do the most of the Slavery as those on the Missourie" — that neither captain records. Because Ordway had been sent upriver for roots and bread, he was the only journalist embedded in the village that morning, and his entry preserves observations the captains, fixed at camp, could not make.
Lewis, by contrast, devotes substantial space to veterinary matters. His gelded horse
wounded his thigh on the inner side with the rope by which he was confined that evening and is now so much swolen with the wound the castraiting and the collection of vermen that he cannot walk, in short he is the most wretched specticle.
Lewis describes treating the wounds with "a strong decoction of the bark of the roots & leaves of elder." Clark mentions the same horse but attributes the injury differently — "his hip out of place" — and credits Lewis with the prognosis. The discrepancy is minor but instructive: Clark relays through Lewis what Lewis observed firsthand.
Logistics, Hunger, and a Sick Child
The captains and Ordway all note the killing of a colt for meat — Clark explaining most fully that "the greater part of our men have not had any Meat to eate for 2 days, and the roots they Complain of, not being accustiomed to live on them altogether." Lewis adds the culinary verdict: "fat tender and by no means illy flavoured." All four record Sergeant Pryor’s reconnaissance toward Collins’s Creek (Lolo Creek) in search of a better camp; only Ordway notes that Pryor failed because "the clifts were so high he got only 8 miles."
Most poignantly, Clark closes his entry with information no other journalist mentions: "Shabonoes Son a Small child is, dangerously ill. his jaw and throat is much Swelled. we apply a poltice of Onions." This is Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, then about fifteen months old. That Lewis omits the illness — though he and Clark were jointly treating the child in subsequent days — is a reminder that even the captains’ famously parallel journals are not redundant: Clark frequently carries domestic and medical detail that Lewis lets pass.
