The entries for May 27, 1806, offer an unusually clean specimen of how the Lewis and Clark journalists divided narrative labor. Stalled at Camp Chopunnish waiting for the Bitterroot snows to melt, the captains and their sergeants all describe the same cluster of events: the killing of a gift horse, a second sweat-bath treatment for an ailing Nez Perce chief, the dispatch of John Ordway toward Lewis’s River for salmon, and the return of hunters with five deer. What changes is voice, depth, and what each narrator chooses to elevate.
Captains in Parallel: Clark Copies, Lewis Editorializes
The most striking textual relationship is between William Clark and Meriwether Lewis. Their entries run nearly word-for-word through long passages — a familiar pattern for this stretch of the journey, in which Clark transcribes from Lewis’s field notes (or vice versa) with light modification. Compare the captains on Hohastillpilp’s offer of his herd. Clark writes:
hohastillpilp told us that most of the horses which we Saw running in those plains in this neighbourhood at large belonged to himself and his people, and whenever we were in want of meet, he requested that would kill any of them we wished; this is a piece of liberallity which would do honour to Such as host of civilization.
Lewis preserves the sentence verbatim and then extends it with a characteristic moral aside:
indeed I doubt whether there are not a great number of our countrymen who would see us fast many days before their compassion would excite them to a similar act of liberallity.
Clark stops at the praise; Lewis turns the praise into an indictment of his own countrymen. The pattern recurs throughout the day’s entry. Where Clark notes the sick chief has been “helpless for near 5 years,” Lewis writes “upwards of three years” — a small but telling discrepancy that suggests the captains were working from independent recollections of what the Nez Perce family had told them, even where their prose otherwise aligns. Both then pivot, in identical language, to the burrowing squirrel, beginning the careful zoological measurements (“1 foot 5 inches & a half from the nose to the extremity of the tail”) that mark their shared natural-history register.
The Sergeants’ Different Eyes
Patrick Gass and John Ordway, the two sergeants journaling this day, do not echo the captains and barely echo each other. Gass, ever the laconic carpenter-turned-chronicler, compresses the day into a workmanlike inventory:
We therefore killed another horse to day, which one of the natives gave us some time ago for that purpose. He was so wild and vicious that we could not manage him or do any thing with him.
This detail — that the gift horse was unmanageable — appears in no other journal. Lewis and Clark frame the killing as a meditation on Nez Perce generosity; Gass frames it as a practical solution to a livestock problem. Gass alone also notes that the horses subjected to “the quieting operation” (gelding) are “all mending,” tracking the camp’s veterinary recovery as carefully as he tracks the human patients.
Ordway’s entry is the day’s outlier because Ordway himself is the outlier: he is the one sent away. While the captains and Gass record his departure in a single line, Ordway is writing from the trail, describing the swim across the river with the horses, the ascent to “a high hill on a plain,” and arrival at a chief’s village some thirteen miles up Commeap Creek. He closes with a domestic detail no one in camp could have supplied:
we camped here, and had a hard Thunder Shower, the Indians grass houses leak.
The captains, back at Long Camp, mention no rain at all; Gass logs only that “some rain fell” in the afternoon. Ordway’s storm — and the leaking lodge — is the kind of granular, embodied observation that the field journal captures and the command journal smooths away.
The Sweat Lodge: Medicine as Ethnography
All three Long Camp journalists note the second sweat treatment of the paralyzed chief, but their framings diverge. Gass reports it as a procedure (“The Indian, that we have under cure, had another sweat to day”). Clark and Lewis, working from the same underlying notes, expand the episode into ethnographic reflection on Chopunnish family life, observing that the chief’s father performed “all the drugery” and that the Nez Perce “treat their women with more respect than the nativs on the Missouri” (Clark) or “the nations of the Missouri” (Lewis). The editorial gloss appended to Ordway’s published journal — describing John Shields’s earlier, successful sweat cure of William Bratton — supplies a context the captains’ May 27 entries assume but do not state: this Nez Perce treatment is being modeled on a remedy the expedition had just borrowed back from one of its own men. Across four narrators, a single afternoon at Camp Chopunnish becomes a layered record of cross-cultural medicine, careful taxonomy, and the small frictions — wild horses, leaking roofs, disagreements about how long a man has been ill — that distinguish one journal-keeper from another.
