The entries of May 28, 1806, offer a striking case study in how four members of the Corps of Discovery could share a camp, a day, and many of the same events—and yet produce documents of radically different texture. Patrick Gass, John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis all wrote from or about Camp Chopunnish, where the expedition awaited the melting of snow in the Bitterroots. Their entries reveal the now-familiar division of labor among the journals: Gass terse, Ordway mobile and observational, Clark and Lewis closely paired but each pursuing his own intellectual preoccupations.
Shared Events, Divergent Registers
The day’s principal happenings at the main camp are easy to reconstruct because Clark and Lewis record them in nearly identical language. Both note that Goodrich was sent to the village of the Broken Arm for hair to stuff saddle pads; that Reubin and Joseph Field set out to hunt; that Charbonneau, York, and Lepage returned at noon with four bags of cous roots; and that Collins, Shannon, and Colter returned in the evening with eight deer. Lewis writes:
in the evening Collins Shannon and Colter returned with eight deer. they had fortunately discovered a ford on Collins’s Creek where they were enabled to pass it with their horses and had hunted at the quawmash ground where we first met with the Chopunnish last fall.
Clark’s version is virtually word-for-word, with only minor orthographic differences (“Cotter” for “Colter,” “there” for “their”). The pattern—Clark copying Lewis or both copying a shared draft—is well attested for the Camp Chopunnish weeks, and this entry exemplifies it.
Gass, by contrast, compresses the same news into a single sentence:
Some hunters went out this morning, and in the afternoon three of them came in with eight deer; at the same time three more of our men returned from the villages.
Gass names no one, identifies no creek, and omits the cous roots entirely. His entry is the workmanlike report of a sergeant logging the camp’s net intake of meat and men.
Ordway is absent from this convergence altogether. He was off on a separate excursion—evidently a hunting or trading ride with a Nez Perce guide—and his entry describes country none of the others saw that day: a two-hour ride across a plain, then a southward turn through “unlevel timbred country,” sightings of “big horn animel or mountain Sheep” and fourteen deer, a thunderstorm, and a descent down a “bad hill” to a creek and an Indian village. Ordway’s voice on May 28 is the voice of a scout, not a camp diarist; his observations of bighorn sheep have no parallel in any other journal that day.
The Sick Chief, the Cous Root, and the Corvus
Where Clark and Lewis diverge is in what each chooses to expand upon after the shared bulletin. Both record that the sick Nez Perce chief was better and had consented to further sweats—Clark adding the personal note, “I Sincerly wish that the Swetts may restore him”—but from there their pens move in opposite directions.
Clark turns outward, to the country itself, drafting one of his most expansive assessments of the Columbia Plateau as potential settlement land:
this Country would form an extensive Settlement; the Climate appears quit as mild as that of a Similar latitude on the Atlantic Coast; & it cannot be otherwise than healthy; it possesses a fine dry pure air.
He then moves to a careful ethnobotanical description of the cous root, comparing it to ginseng in form and consistence and recording in detail how the Nez Perce rub off the “thin black rhind,” pound it, and dry the cakes “about an inch and 1/4 thick and 6 by 18 in wedth.” The passage is Clark at his most Jeffersonian—evaluating the land for agriculture, the people for their economy, the plants for their utility.
Lewis, by contrast, turns inward to a single bird. After noting that the chief’s child is also improving and that an “imposthume” is advancing to maturity, he launches into an extended description of a corvid he has finally had a chance to examine closely—almost certainly Clark’s nutcracker. Lewis’s prose is the prose of a working naturalist:
this is much larger and has a loud squawling note something like the mewing of a cat. the beak of this bird is 11/2 inches long, is proportionably large, black and of the form which characterizes this genus.
He measures the tail (“four and a half inches in length, composed of 12 feathers”), counts toes, notes the curvature of the nails, and distinguishes the species from the smaller corvid he had described at Fort Clatsop—a self-correction that shows him actively revising his own taxonomy.
Four Pens, One Day
Read together, the May 28 entries map the documentary geography of the expedition with unusual clarity. Gass gives the camp’s bookkeeping. Ordway, away from camp, supplies the only record of a parallel landscape. Clark and Lewis share a common factual core but split their longer reflections between settlement geography and natural history—a division that, across the journals as a whole, accounts for much of the complementary richness of the Lewis and Clark archive.
