The journal entries for May 1, 1806 capture the Corps of Discovery moving up the Touchet River in present-day Walla Walla County, Washington, having departed the Walla Walla villages the previous day. All four narrators present — Lewis, Clark, Ordway, and Gass — record a march of roughly twenty-six miles, a beaver killed by the hunters, and a deer taken by Labiche near the evening camp. Beyond this shared skeleton, however, the entries diverge in striking ways, revealing the captains’ deliberative process, the sergeants’ more compressed reportage, and a notable difference in what each narrator chose to preserve about Wallawalla integrity.
The Forked Road and the Disputed Guides
The day’s defining episode was a disagreement between two Nez Perce informants over which trail to follow. Lewis and Clark both treat the moment at length, and their accounts run so closely parallel that Clark plainly drew on Lewis — or both worked from a shared field draft. Lewis writes that after nine miles up the creek, the Chopunnish man riding with him pointed out “an old unbeaten tract” to the left as the nearest route, prompting the captains to halt and wait for their assigned guide:
when the guide arrived he seemed much displeased with the other, he assured us that the rout up the creek was the nearest, and much the best, that if we took the other we would be obliged to remain here untill tomorrow morning, and then travel a whole day before we could reach water, and that there was no wood
Clark renders the same exchange with additional emotional color, noting that “Some words took place between those two men the latter appeared in great pation Mounted his horse and Set out up the Creek.” Clark also preserves the detail that a man was sent to retrieve the offended guide and reassure him. Both captains record the diplomatic gift of powder and ball to the departing Chopunnish man — a small ethnographic detail that Ordway and Gass omit entirely.
Sergeant Gass compresses the episode into two sentences, registering only that “our Indians differed in opinion with respect to the best road” and that the party “followed the opinion of … the young man our guide.” Ordway flattens the dispute still further, mentioning merely that “Several of the Savages who accompy us leave us here and take a cross road to the Columbia river.” The fork in the trail, which consumed paragraphs of the captains’ attention, becomes in the enlisted journals a routine parting of company.
The Returned Steel Trap
The entries also diverge on an incident that occurred after the party encamped on the Touchet. Ordway gives the fullest and most reflective account of two young Wallawalla men who overtook the camp to return a forgotten steel trap:
this is an Instance which we had not any right to expect from Savages, we gave them one a knife the other a Sun glass, &.C. and a little vension. the wal-a-wal tribe of Flat heads have proved themselves the honnestest Savages we have met with for they had great chance to Steel had they been disposed
Ordway extends the passage into a remarkable summary of Wallawalla requests for future trade — “guns and ammunition, copper kittles, knives beeds Scarlet buttens” — material that has no parallel in the other May 1 entries. Lewis records the same arrival at the close of his entry, calling it “an act of integrity rarely witnessed,” but his text breaks off mid-sentence in the surviving manuscript. Clark’s entry, as transcribed here, also ends before the trap incident, and Gass omits it altogether. Ordway thus emerges as the principal witness to one of the expedition’s more sympathetic ethnographic judgments — and the only narrator on this date to preserve the Wallawalla shopping list for future American traders.
Register and Landscape
Differences of register also surface in the day’s landscape description. Clark catalogs the creek-bottom flora — “Small Cotton trees, willow, red willow, choke Cherry, white thorn, birch, elder, ____ rose & honey suckle” — and notes the recent burning that “entirely distroyed the timbered growth.” Lewis, by contrast, reaches for comparison rather than enumeration, observing that he sees “very little difference between the apparent face of the country here and that of the plains of the Missouri only that these are not enlivened by the vast herds of buffaloe Elk &c.” Gass offers a workmanlike summary — “a fine stream about twenty yards wide, with some cotton-wood, birch and willows on its banks” — while Ordway looks outward to the horizon, recording a “timbred country a long distance to the S. E. & Moun* of Snow,” a Blue Mountains sighting the captains do not mention. Across the four entries, the same day’s march yields a botanical inventory, a continental comparison, a surveyor’s note, and a distant prospect — each shaped by the writer’s habits of attention.
