The entries for May 2, 1806, capture the Corps of Discovery on the move east from the Columbia, accompanied by three young Walla Walla men who had overtaken the party the previous evening. All four journalists—Lewis, Clark, Ordway, and Gass—record the same core sequence: a missing horse, a hired Indian searcher, a successful recovery, and a nineteen-mile march up a forking creek into country showing increasing signs of beaver. Yet the four accounts differ markedly in what each narrator chooses to elevate, and in one case Gass preserves a detail the captains omit entirely.
Gass Alone Records the Returned Trap
The most striking divergence opens Gass’s entry. He alone reports that
three of the Wal-la-wal-las came up with us, and brought a steel trap that had been left at our camp on the north side of the Columbia, opposite the mouth of Wal-la-wal-la river: per-haps one of the greatest instances of honesty ever known among Indians.
Neither Lewis nor Clark mentions the trap, though both note that “the three young men of the Wollahwollah nation continued with us.” Ordway likewise omits the trap. Gass’s editorial flourish—”perhaps one of the greatest instances of honesty ever known among Indians”—reflects the register of his published 1807 narrative, which was shaped by editor David McKeehan for a reading public hungry for moral set-pieces. The captains, writing field journals rather than for publication, treat the Walla Wallas’ presence as logistical fact and reserve their ethnographic attention for the botanical observations that close the day.
The Captains in Near-Lockstep
Lewis and Clark’s entries for May 2 are, as is typical for the return journey, almost verbatim duplicates. Both open with the identical phrasing about dispatching two hunters and the “much difficulty” of collecting horses; both describe the runaway as the animal “we obtained from the Chopunnish man whom we seperated from yesterday”; both record that the horse was “as we thought securely [hobbled/bubbled] both before and at the side, but he broke the strings in the course of the night and absconded.” The courses, distances, and bearings—”East 3 M.,” “N. 75 E. 7,” “N. 45 E. 9 ms.”—match precisely.
Three small variations are worth flagging. Lewis writes that the recovered horse was found “on his way back about 17 Ms,” a figure Clark copies. Lewis describes the creek as “about 4 yds. wide”; Clark renders it “5 yds wide.” And in the day’s hunting tally, Lewis writes that “our hunters killed a duck only,” while Clark writes “our hunters killed a deer only”—a transcription discrepancy that has long interested editors of the journals. Ordway’s independent count—”one beaver and one otter”—aligns instead with Gass, who likewise reports “only one beaver and an otter,” suggesting the sergeants were comparing notes or drawing on a shared camp report distinct from whatever the captains entered.
Ordway’s Practical Detail and the Botanical Coda
Ordway uniquely preserves the price the captains paid for the Indian’s services:
as soon as the Indian returned him to us our officers gave a tommahawk knife and a pr overalls for the kindness
Lewis and Clark both note only that “I paid the indian the price stipulated for his services,” eliding the goods exchanged. Ordway’s habit of recording specific trade items—a sergeant’s quartermaster eye—repeatedly fills in such gaps in the captains’ accounts.
Lewis and Clark close the entry with a near-identical botanical passage describing the Walla Walla men eating the “inner part of the young and succulent Stem of a large Corse plant with a ternate leaf,” which Lewis identifies as common “in the rich lands on the Ohio and it’s branches”—almost certainly cow parsnip (Heracleum maximum). Both captains report tasting it “without feeling any inconvenience.” Clark, copying, slightly modernizes Lewis’s spelling but preserves the substance. Neither Ordway nor Gass attempts the botanical description, a consistent pattern: natural-history observation belongs to the captains’ register, while the sergeants record cargo, distance, and the human texture of camp.
Patterns of the Day
May 2 is a textbook day for studying narrator function in the journals. Gass supplies moral framing and the trap incident; Ordway supplies the trade goods; Lewis supplies the botanical and topographic detail; Clark copies Lewis with minor numerical drift. Read together, the four accounts triangulate a fuller event than any single journal preserves.
