The journal entries from June 12, 1806, written while the Corps of Discovery waited at their camp on the eastern edge of the Weippe Prairie after being turned back by deep snow in the Bitterroots, offer an unusually clear case study in how the expedition’s four active journalists handled a quiet day. The same events — Shields returning with two deer, Whitehouse retrieving a stray horse, an Indian visitor at camp, the troublesome mosquitoes — appear across all four accounts. But the register, detail, and authorship relationships between the entries reveal much about how the expedition’s written record was being produced.
The Captains in Near-Lockstep
The most striking pattern is the close correspondence between the journals of Lewis and Clark. Their entries for this date are not merely similar — they are almost word-for-word identical, a phenomenon scholars have long observed during the return journey. Compare Clark’s description of the camas prairie:
the quawmash is now in blume at a Short distance it resembles a lake of fine clear water, So complete is this deseption that on first Sight I could have Sworn it was water.
with Lewis’s:
the quawmash is now in blume and from the colour of its bloom at a short distance it resembles lakes of fine clear water, so complete is this deseption that on first sight I could have swoarn it was water.
The shared phrasing, down to the misspelling “deseption” and the arresting image of the blue camas flowers mistaken for standing water, indicates that one captain copied from the other — most likely Clark from Lewis, given Lewis’s slightly fuller version (“from the colour of its bloom”) and his general practice of original composition during this leg. A small but telling divergence appears in the message from the Cutnose: Lewis writes that two young men would overtake “me” to the falls of the Missouri, while Clark writes “us” and adds “and probably to the Seat of our Governmt.” Clark, in copying, personalized the plural and speculated further on the Nez Perce travelers’ destination.
Gass and Ordway: Different Eyes on the Same Camp
Sergeant Ordway’s entry is the briefest of the four, focused tightly on the practical work of the day. He notes that the party “fleased what meat we have to dry it for the Mountains” — a detail neither captain records, though it was surely the central labor of the camp as the expedition prepared a second attempt at the Bitterroot crossing. Ordway’s perspective is that of a working noncommissioned officer: hunters out, meat in, meat preserved.
Patrick Gass, by contrast, produces by far the longest and most naturalistically curious entry of the day. Where the captains compress the morning into a sentence, Gass tracks the rhythm of hunters going out and coming in across the entire day. More distinctively, he turns to natural history with the eye of an interested observer:
The squirrels are about the size of our common grey squirrels, and very handsome. They are of a brown grey colour, beautifully speckled with small brown spots, and burrow in the ground.
His description of a previously unfamiliar woodpecker — “all black except the belly and neck, where the ends of the feathers are tipped with a deep red” — is the kind of zoological notice one might expect from Lewis, who was the expedition’s designated naturalist. Yet on this day Lewis records nothing of the local fauna beyond the mosquitoes. Gass also reports an exchange the captains omit entirely: “The Indian who came to our camp said he had a notion to cross the mountains with us.” In the captains’ versions, the visitor is a passive presence who merely “spent the night.” In Gass’s, he speaks.
What the Composite Reveals
Read together, the four entries triangulate a fuller day than any single journal preserves. The captains supply the lyrical observation — the camas prairie that looked like a lake — and the diplomatic context of expected Nez Perce companions. Ordway supplies the labor of fleshing and drying meat. Gass supplies the wildlife and the visitor’s voice. The near-duplication of the Lewis and Clark entries on June 12 also reminds readers that the captains’ journals, often treated as independent witnesses, frequently functioned as a single text in two hands during 1806. Where the captains move in unison, the sergeants’ journals become indispensable correctives, recording details and conversations that the official record passes over in its phrase “nothing interesting occurred in the course of this day.”
