The entries of May 18, 1806, offer an unusually clear window into how the four journalists of the Lewis and Clark expedition handled identical raw material. Camp Chopunnish was static, hemmed in by snow on the Bitterroots, and the day’s events — twelve hunters dispatched, a bear carcass retrieved, three hungry Nez Perce visitors, an eagle robbed of a salmon, a rainy night — were experienced in common. What each man chose to preserve, expand, or omit reveals the working habits of the corps’s documentary system.
Parallel Texts: Clark and Lewis
Clark and Lewis produced near-twin entries, a pattern familiar to readers of the journals during the return journey. Both open with the identical phrasing about “Twelve hunters turned out this morning in different directions agreeably to the order” of the previous evening, and both proceed through the same sequence of events in the same order. Yet Lewis consistently expands where Clark compresses.
On the bear brought in by Collins, Potts, and Whitehouse, Clark notes only that it was “not large but remarkably light coloured” with hair “very thick and long.” Lewis devotes a full naturalist’s paragraph to the pelage:
the colours of this bear was a mixture of light redish brown white and dark brown in which the bey or redish brown predominated, the fur was bey as well as the lower pertion of the long hairs, the white next succeeded in the long hairs which at their extremites were dark brown, this uncommon mixture might be termed a bey grizzle.
The same pattern holds for the fishing stand the Nez Perce erected across the river. Clark merely registers its appearance and puzzles over its purpose: “we cannot Say by whome or for what service that lodge has been errected.” Lewis, by contrast, immediately interprets the structure as a salmon platform and supplies an engineering description — “a small stage are warf constructed of sticks and projecting about 10 feet into the river and about 3 feet above the surface” — together with a comparative note on the scoop net’s resemblance to those “commonly used in our country.” Where Clark observes, Lewis explicates.
The Enlisted Men: Compression and Different Counts
Patrick Gass and John Ordway, working in the abbreviated style typical of the sergeants’ journals, reduce the day to its skeleton. Gass collapses the twelve hunters into the bare phrase “ten of the party turned out to hunt” — a discrepancy with the captains’ “twelve” that may reflect either his own count or imperfect knowledge of the morning’s dispositions. Ordway does not specify a number at all, mentioning only that men went “on horseback” to make “a Camp hunt” in the high country, a logistical detail neither captain records.
The two sergeants also differ from the captains, and from each other, on the day’s meager game. Gass reports that the four returning hunters “had killed nothing, but some grouse.” Ordway specifies “one hawk & a pheasant.” Lewis and Clark both agree on “a large hawk” (Clark) or simply “a hawk” (Lewis). The grouse-versus-pheasant slippage is characteristic: frontier English used the terms loosely, and the sergeants likely heard the kill described in passing rather than examining it.
Gass omits entirely two items the captains both record: Sacagawea’s gathering of year-pah (fennel) roots for the mountain crossing, and the salmon snatched from the eagle by LaPage. Ordway likewise omits both. These are precisely the kinds of details — ethnobotanical preparation and a hopeful sign of the salmon run — that the captains’ more capacious entries are designed to preserve.
Shared Concerns, Different Registers
All four narrators converge on the day’s medical encounters, though with varying specificity. Gass notes that five strangers received “eye water” and that an old man and his sick wife came for medicine. Clark and Lewis both name the medicines administered to the woman — “creme of tartar and flour of sulpher” — and diagnose her with “a gripeing and rhumatic” or “lax and rheumatic” complaint. Ordway, focused on the hunting parties, omits the clinic entirely.
Only Lewis closes the day with an expression of bodily misery: “the air was extreemly cold and disagreeable and we lay in the water as the preceeding night.” Clark mentions the rain but not the suffering. The sergeants mention neither. It is a small reminder that even within a tightly coordinated journal-keeping enterprise, the captains’ fuller entries preserve the texture of camp life — the cold, the hope of salmon, the mottled coat of a bear — that the abbreviated military journals leave on the cutting-room floor.
