The expedition’s reunion with the Nez Perce in early May 1806 produced a remarkable convergence of practical hunger, frontier diplomacy, and cartographic ambition. Comparing the entries of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway for May 6 reveals how a single day could be filtered through four very different sensibilities — the captains’ near-identical official record, the sergeants’ plainer accounts of subsistence and travel.
Medicine as Currency
All four narrators register the central transaction of the day: a young horse received in payment for medical services. Clark’s account is the fullest, foregrounding his own role as physician.
we received a Second horse for Medecine & procription to a little girl with the rhumitism whome I had bathed in worm water, and anointed her a little with balsom Capivia.
Lewis’s parallel entry mirrors Clark’s almost verbatim but shifts the agency, writing that “Capt. C. dressed the woman again this morning” and “Capt. C. was busily engaged for several hours this morning in administering eye-water to a croud of applicants.” The duplication of phrasing — down to “sore eyes is an universal complaint” — confirms what scholars have long noted: by 1806 the captains were actively coordinating their journals, with Lewis often deferring to Clark’s first-person observations while preserving his own narrative voice on matters of natural history and geography.
The enlisted men cast the same exchange in cruder, hungrier terms. Gass writes that the captains “acted as physicians to the sick of the village or lodge, for which they gave us a small horse, that we killed and eat, as we had no other meat of any kind.” Ordway adds a telling detail neither captain mentions: “some of the men are gitting Sick eating roots.” The sergeants record the bodily cost of a root-based diet that the officers’ entries gloss over in the more sanitized phrase “a plentifull meal, much to the Comfort of all the party.”
Naming a River, Mapping a Continent
The day’s other major event is geographic. Three Skeetsomish men arrive in camp, and Lewis seizes the encounter to reorganize the expedition’s mental map of the Columbia drainage. He records the renaming with characteristic deliberateness:
The river here called Clark’s river is that which we have heretofore called the Flathead river, I have thus named it in honour of my worthy friend and fellow traveller Capt. Clark.
Clark’s own version of the same passage is more circumspect about the honor — “Capt. Lewis has thought proper to Call this after myself” — a small but characteristic deflection. Both captains then engage in a complex reshuffling of nomenclature: the stream they had previously called Clark’s river is now to be the Towannahiooks, after the name used by the Eneshur (Clark adds the Skillutes). Lewis frets in his entry that he learned the Skeetsomish spoke an entirely different language from the Chopunnish only “when we were about to set out and it was then too late to take a vocabulary” — a rare admission of ethnographic regret.
Gass and Ordway register none of this cartographic activity. Their concerns are immediate and tactical: where the road leads, how the river crosses, who camps with whom. Ordway notes the recovery of cached ammunition and reports that “the big horn chief and a number other Indians Camped with us.” Gass, writing in the more polished retrospective style of his published journal, generalizes about Indian character in a way the captains avoid:
All the Indians from the Rocky Mountains to the falls of Columbia, are an honest, ingenious and well disposed people; but from the falls to the sea coast, and along it, they are a rascally, thieving set.
Trade Goods and Continental Connections
Ordway alone preserves a striking observation about the circulation of trade items, noting that the Nez Perce “had buffaloe robes war axes &C … these Indians have they got from the Grousevauntares on the Missourie & they got them from us at the Mandans.” The detail traces a continental commerce in which the expedition’s own gifts, distributed eighteen months earlier, had already crossed the Rockies ahead of them. Neither captain records this circuit, though it bears directly on the diplomatic and material networks they were ostensibly mapping.
Lewis’s entry, finally, looks forward: he describes the sorrel he received from We-ark’-koomt as “perfictly calculated for my purposes” and notes that timber along the Kooskooske “consists principally of the long leafed pine.” The captain’s gaze is already on the mountain crossing ahead — a crossing the Nez Perce, as Gass records on May 8, would soon warn was still “a moon and an half” away.
