June 2, 1806, found the Corps of Discovery at Camp Chopunnish on the Clearwater, waiting for the Bitterroot snows to recede. The day’s events — a trading mission across the river, the return of a fishing party, and the recovery of two long-lost tomahawks — appear in all four extant journals, but each narrator filters the day through a distinct lens. Read together, the entries expose both the close textual dependency between the captains and the independent perspectives of the enlisted men.
Coat Buttons and the East India Merchant
Lewis and Clark’s entries for this date are nearly verbatim twins, a pattern common in the latter half of the journey. Both record that McNeal and York were dispatched across the river to trade, having exhausted the expedition’s merchandise. Both reach for the same striking simile when the traders return:
in the evening they returned with about 3 bushels of roots and Some bread haveing made a Suckcessfull voyage, not much less pleasing to us than the return of a good Cargo to an East India merchant.
The phrasing in Clark’s notebook matches Lewis’s almost word for word, suggesting one captain copied from the other — a question of priority that has long occupied editors of the journals. The small divergences are revealing: Clark writes that Lewis brought the tin boxes “from Philadelphia,” while Lewis specifies he had brought them “with Phosphorus,” a chemist’s detail characteristic of his more technical voice. Both record that the trade goods consisted of buttons cut from their own coats, eye water, and basilicon ointment — a vivid index of how thoroughly the expedition’s stores had been depleted.
Clark adds a memorable rhetorical flourish about the Rockies that Lewis echoes nearly identically:
that wretched portion of our journy, the Rocky Mountains, where hungar and Cold in their most regorous form assail the waried traveller; not any of us have yet forgotten our those mountains in September last, I think it probable we never Shall.
The Sergeants’ Plainer Record
Patrick Gass and John Ordway, writing without reference to one another or to the captains, produce strikingly different accounts of the same day. Ordway, who had himself led the fishing party, writes from inside the experience: he describes returning to camp, swimming the horses across a river “verry high indeed,” and learning that a canoe had upset and sunk during their absence with the loss of “three blankets one blanket cappo and Several articles.” None of this material loss appears in the captains’ entries, which mention only that Ordway returned with seventeen salmon. Clark notes the fish were “as fat as any I ever saw,” but it is Ordway who supplies the logistical texture — the swamped canoe, the sick horse shot by the men, the head chief’s evening visit.
Gass, writing from camp, offers something neither captain records: an extended ethnographic and geopolitical reflection prompted by a single object. One of the returning fishermen, he reports, “got two Spanish dollars from an Indian for an old razor.” Gass then traces the coins backward through a chain of speculation:
They said they got the dollars from about a Snake Indian’s neck, they had killed some time ago. There are several dollars among these people which they get in some way. We suppose the Snake Indians, some of whom do not live very far from New Mexico get them from the Spaniards in that quarter.
This is Gass at his most analytical — a sergeant connecting Columbia Plateau trade networks to Spanish New Mexico through the evidence of a single coin. Lewis and Clark, despite their fuller scientific apparatus, do not mention the Spanish dollars at all.
The Tomahawk and the Dying Man
The day’s most ethnographically rich episode is Drouillard’s recovery of two tomahawks, including one that had belonged to the late Sergeant Charles Floyd, who died in August 1804. Ordway notes the recovery briefly: the chief “brought and gave up a tommahawk which Cap[t] Clark lost last fall.” Lewis and Clark, however, devote a full paragraph to the negotiation. The man who possessed Floyd’s tomahawk, both captains report, was “at the moment of their arival just expireing,” and his relations had intended to bury the weapon with him. They relinquished it only after Drouillard offered a handkerchief and beads, and the chiefs Neeshneparkkeeook and Hohastillpilp pledged two horses to be sacrificed at the grave.
Lewis extends the entry into a comparative ethnographic note absent from Clark’s version: a description of Chopunnish burial practice — stones piled on the grave, wooden splinters wedged in the interstices, a roof of split timber — and the observation that Neeshneparkkeeook had recently sacrificed twenty-eight horses for a deceased wife. Clark gives the same custom but no figure. The detail is characteristic: Lewis the natural historian reaches for the specific number; Clark the narrator keeps the focus on the human transaction and on returning Floyd’s tomahawk “to his friends.”
Across four narrators, then, the day fractures into four registers — the captains’ shared literary set-piece, Ordway’s operational log, and Gass’s geopolitical curiosity — each preserving something the others omit.
