The entries of May 16, 1806 offer an unusually clear window into how the expedition’s four active journalists divided narrative labor during the four-week pause at Camp Chopunnish. Patrick Gass, John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis all describe the same weather, the same departing Nez Perce visitors, and the same disappointing return of the hunting parties — yet each account reveals distinct priorities of register, detail, and audience.
Compression and Expansion: The Sergeants Versus the Captains
Gass, characteristically, condenses the day into four sentences. He notes the clearing weather, an Indian performing ‘the quieting operation’ (gelding) on two horses, and the return of hunters with ‘two deer and some ducks.’ His record contains information found nowhere else — the gelding work and the ducks — but omits nearly everything the captains found significant. Ordway’s entry is similarly compressed but reports the wounded bears and deer with a slight variation in tally, writing that the hunters ‘had wounded three white bear and killed two two Deer.’
Clark and Lewis, by contrast, produce expansive entries that overlap so closely in structure and phrasing that the textual relationship between them is unmistakable. Both open with Drouillard’s strayed horse being returned by an Indian; both pivot to Hohastillpilp’s departure; both describe the gift of a bear’s head and neck; both then turn to ethnographic observations about Nez Perce bear-hunting practices, the recovery of the sick men, Sacagawea’s fennel roots, and the day’s hunting reports. The parallel sequence suggests the captains were sharing notes, with one likely working from the other’s draft.
Where Lewis and Clark Diverge
Despite the shared scaffolding, the two captains’ versions are not identical. Clark provides the longer ethnographic gloss on Nez Perce attitudes toward grizzlies:
The Indians of this Country Seldom kill the bear they are very much afraid of them and the killing of a white or Grzley bear, is as great a feet as two of their enimy.
Lewis covers the same ground more briefly, noting only that ‘these people sometimes kill the variagated bear when they can get them in the open plain.’ Lewis adds, however, a distinction Clark omits — that ‘the black bear they more frequently kill as they are less ferocious.’
The dietary observations show a similar pattern of complementary detail. Clark calls Sacagawea’s fennel roots ‘very paleatiable and nurishing food,’ while Lewis elaborates botanically:
the flavor of this root is not unlike annis seed, and they dispell the wind which the roots called Cows and quawmash are apt to create particularly the latter.
This is a quintessential Lewis touch — the comparative flavor note, the practical pharmacology, the implicit cataloguing of Cous and camas alongside the new fennel. Clark records the food; Lewis records the science.
The Snake Only Lewis Sees
Nowhere is the divergence in narrator interest sharper than in the day’s herpetological encounter. Clark mentions a snake almost in passing, noting it ‘resembles the rattle Snake in colour and Spots on the Skin, longer and inosent.’ Lewis, who killed and preserved the specimen, devotes a full paragraph to it:
it is 3 feet 11 Inches in length… it has 218 scutae on the abdomen and fifty nine squamae or half formed scutae on the tail. the eye is of moderate size, the iris of a dark yellowish brown and puple black.
The contrast is instructive. Clark, capable of long ethnographic passages, treats the snake as incidental. Lewis treats it as a specimen for Philadelphia, measuring scutes with the precision of a trained naturalist and noting that he ‘preserved the skin.’ Gass and Ordway do not mention the snake at all.
A Day Reconstructed from Four Angles
Read together, the four entries demonstrate the layered redundancy that makes the expedition’s record so durable. Gass preserves the gelding work; Ordway alone fixes Drouillard’s bear count at three wounded; Clark provides the most thorough ethnography of Nez Perce bear practice and the order to drive the horses up at noon; Lewis preserves the natural-history specimen and the comparative botany of the root diet. The scene at Camp Chopunnish on May 16 — damp, dull, marked by failed hunts and a generous gift of bear meat to departing hosts — survives in fuller form than any single journal could provide.
