The journals of John Ordway, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark for May 23, 1806 offer an unusually clear window into how the expedition’s three working diarists handled a shared day at Camp Chopunnish. All three open with the same dramatic episode — Sergeant Pryor’s wounded deer, the camp dog, and two Nez Perce horsemen who swam the Clearwater to drive the animal back across — yet each narrator weights the day differently, revealing distinct priorities and, in places, clear textual borrowing between the captains.
The Swimming Deer: Three Versions of a Single Event
Ordway, writing in his characteristically plain register, reports the hunt as a sequence of physical actions: the deer “Swam the river to the S. Side,” the Indians “Swam the river with their horses and ran the deer,” and Pryor finally killed it on the return crossing. Lewis and Clark’s accounts of the same incident are nearly verbatim with one another. Lewis writes:
Sergt. Pryor wounded a deer early this morning in a lick near camp; my dog pursud it into the river; the two young Indian men who had remained with us all night mounted their horses swam the river and drove the deer into the water again; Sergt. Pryor killed it as it reached the shore on this side.
Clark’s version tracks the same clauses in the same order, with only minor substitutions (“our dog” for “my dog,” “Came out of the Water” for “reached the shore”). The parallelism strongly suggests one captain copied from the other — a familiar pattern at Long Camp, where Clark frequently transcribed Lewis’s prose. Ordway, by contrast, writes independently and adds a detail the captains omit: the Indians “Swam their horses back after it” to retrieve their share, a small logistical observation consistent with his sergeant’s eye for movement and labor.
Medicine and Reputation
Where the three narrators diverge most sharply is in their treatment of the day’s medical work. Ordway alone records the experimental treatment of William Bratton, whose months-long back complaint had defeated every remedy the captains could devise:
Wm bratton having been so long better than 3 months nearly helpless with a Severe pain in his back we now undertake Sweeting him nearly in the manner as the Indians do only cover the hole with blankits having bows bent over above the hole, we expect this opperation will help him.
This is a striking omission from both captains’ entries — particularly given that the sweat lodge treatment, adopted from Nez Perce practice, would soon be credited with Bratton’s recovery. Lewis and Clark instead foreground their own clinical work: the cream of tartar and sulphur administered to a sick child, the renewed onion poultices, and the arrival of four Nez Perce who had ridden two days from Lewis’s River seeking eyewater. Lewis frames this last visit with evident pride, observing that “our skill as phisicans and the virture of our medecines have been spread it seems to a great distance,” before adding the more candid wish that “it was in our power to give releif to these poor afficted wretches.” Clark records the same visit but strips out the reflective sentence, retaining only the procedural facts.
Natural History: Clark Alone
The most substantial divergence comes at the end of the day. Lewis closes with a brief note on the castrated horses and his pet theory that the Indian method of gelding produces less swelling than “the common way.” Clark repeats the horse observation but then breaks into extended natural-history description that appears nowhere else: a “whisteling squerel” Labiche shot on the high plains, distinguished from Missouri and Columbia varieties by “Colour, Size, food and the length tal,” and a “large hooting owl” whose plumage Clark renders with unusual care:
The plumage of this owl is an uniform mixture of dark yellowish brown and white, in which the dark brown prodominates. it’s Colour may be properly termed a dark Iron gray. the plumage is very long and remarkably Silky and Soft.
This is the great gray owl, and Clark’s description — absent entirely from Lewis’s entry for the day — is one of several instances in the late spring of 1806 in which Clark, often portrayed as the less literary of the two captains, supplies the day’s most detailed scientific observation. Ordway, meanwhile, ends with the practical news that mattered to the enlisted men: the hunters returned empty-handed, most of the party walked to the nearby village to trade for couse and shappalell, and the natives caught three salmon. Three journals, three registers — the officer-naturalist, the officer-physician, and the sergeant-quartermaster — converging on a single deer and then dispersing toward what each man was trained to see.
