The 21st of May 1806 found the Corps of Discovery still pinned at Camp Chopunnish on the Clearwater, waiting for the deep snows of the Bitterroots to relent. Three narrators — Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, and Sergeant John Ordway — left entries for the day. Read together, they reveal both the tight collaboration between the captains’ journals and the distinct field of vision available to a sergeant detached to a Nez Perce village.
The Captains in Parallel
Lewis and Clark’s entries for this day track each other almost line by line, a pattern familiar to readers of the later journals. Both record that Shields and Gibson set out to hunt, that Collins returned empty-handed, that five men were set to building a canoe, and that the tent had been supplemented by a grass-covered shelter. Both inventory the pitiful remnant of trade goods divided among the party. Clark writes:
we devided our Store of merchindize amongst our party for the purpose of precureing Some roots &c. of the nativs to each mans part amounted to about an awl Knitting pin a little paint and Some thread & 2 Needles which is but a Scanty dependance for roots to take us over those Great Snowey Barriers (rocky mountains)
Lewis’s version is more precise and more rhetorical:
each man’s stock in trade amounts to no more than one awl, one Kniting pin, a half an ounce of vermillion, two nedles, a few scanes of thead and about a yard of ribbon; a slender stock indeed with which to lay in a store of provision for that dreary wilderness.
The substance is identical, but the register differs. Clark’s “Great Snowey Barriers” is geographic and blunt; Lewis’s “dreary wilderness” is literary, almost elegiac. Lewis also quantifies — “half an ounce of vermillion,” “a yard of ribbon” — where Clark generalizes (“a little paint”). The directional flow of information is suggested by Lewis’s added detail about hemlock: he explains that the men cannot be trusted to gather roots themselves because “there are several speceis of hemlock which are so much like the cows that it is difficult to discriminate them from the cows.” Clark omits this botanical caution entirely, suggesting Lewis composed the more elaborated version and Clark drew from a shared field note while skipping what did not concern him.
The Sandhill Crane and the Reserved Horse
Both captains close their entries with the same pair of details: an Indian-offered horse held in reserve against starvation, and a young sandhill crane brought into camp. Their crane descriptions diverge in a small but telling way. Clark calls the chick “of a yellowish brown Colour,” while Lewis records it as “of a redish brown colour.” Both estimate its age at five or six days and its size at that of a partridge. Such color discrepancies are common where Clark relied on Lewis’s natural-history observations but transcribed from memory or from a brief note. Clark adds an ethological detail Lewis omits — that the cranes go “in pars of two, and Sometimes three together” — a reminder that Clark was not merely copying but occasionally supplementing.
Ordway in the Village
Sergeant Ordway’s entry occupies an entirely different observational world. While the captains catalog stores and shelter at the main camp, Ordway was among the three men permitted to visit the Nez Perce village five miles distant — a detail both captains note in passing (“Sergt. Ordway and Goodrich Continued all night,” Clark writes). Ordway alone records what he heard there:
Some of the women in the village were crying aloud at different times in the course of the day. I Signed the reason of their lamenting & they gave me to understand that they had lost Some of their Sons in battle and that was the custom among them when their relation died they mourn and lement a long time after the aged women only make a loud noise
This is ethnographic observation that the captains, confined to camp, simply could not have made. Ordway’s use of sign language (“I Signed the reason”) and his patient effort to understand the mourning practice — distinguishing the long lamentation of relatives from the loud vocalization of the elderly women — supplies a dimension of the day that vanishes from the official record. The captains’ entries are dominated by anxiety about provisions and the looming snow; Ordway’s is dominated by grief overheard and inquired into.
Three Versions of a Day
Taken together, the three entries illustrate the layered nature of the expedition record. Lewis composes the fullest and most polished narrative; Clark produces a close but abbreviated parallel, occasionally adding a natural-history detail of his own; Ordway, working independently, captures what the captains’ physical position prevented them from seeing. The day’s central facts — empty stomachs, dwindling trade goods, a canoe under construction, mountains still impassable — are common to all three. But the human texture of the Nez Perce village belongs to Ordway alone.
