May 14–15, 1806, at the Long Camp on the north bank of the Koos-koos-ke (Clearwater). An earlier version of this page dated the same Gass passages to October 14, 1806 and pointed them at a one-line Ordway fragment from January 14. Gass’s 1807 book ends at St. Louis on 23 September 1806; there is no October Gass. The crossing, the gelding, the stone-cooked bear, and the six-thumbed scalp sit in the printed May 14–15 entries, where Clark, Lewis, and Ordway also wrote.
Crossing to the north bank
Gass opens May 14 with frost and labor:
white frost. Three hunters went over very early to the north side of the river. All the rest of the men were employed in collecting our horses and taking over the baggage.
By noon the horses and baggage were across, and the party camped at
the remains of an ancient village on the north side of the Koos-koos-ke river
. Clark and Lewis give the same move with surveyor’s measures: the river about 150 yards wide and extremely rapid; the old habitation a circle some 30 feet across, sunk about four feet, with an earthen wall. Ordway is the enlisted confirmation:
we took our baggage and Swam our horses across the river to the N. Side and mooved a Short distance down the river and Encamped in a Smooth bottom partly covred with young pitch pine in order to stay untill we can cross the mountains
They were settling in to wait out Bitterroot snow. Gass on the 15th says they expected to remain a month.
Bears, and who counted them
Ordway names the hunters: Collins two bear “of the white kind,” Labiche three. Gass, not naming them, reports two at midday and three more by evening,
all of the grizly kind
. Lewis and Clark have Collins’s pair in the morning — one fat male, one lean female with cubs — and Labiche later with a female and two cubs. Lewis uses the mixed colors (black, bay, white-tipped) to argue that the “variagated bear” here is one species, not twenty. Clark adds the Chopunnish valuation: killing one of those animals ranks with killing an enemy in the field. The claws of Collins’s bears went to Hohastillpilp.
Gelding, two methods
Gass records the operation without naming a surgeon:
In the afternoon we had an operation performed on seven of our horses, to render them more peaceable; which was done by one of the natives upon all but one.
Lewis and Clark explain why. The stallions would not trade even at two for one, “Cut each other very much,” and had to be castrated. A Chopunnish man present offered to cut them without tying the cord, scraping it clean first; Drewyer gelded two in the usual way. The next day Clark found those cut by Drewyer the most swollen. That is not Gass noticing a craft the captains ignored — the captains wrote the method; Gass wrote the count.
Stone and pine boughs
They gave bear meat to about fifteen Chopunnish at camp. Gass describes layered hot stones, meat, and brush, covered like a small coal pit, needing about an hour and a half. Clark and Lewis give the fuller procedure: river stones on a brisk fire, pine boughs, flitches of bear, more boughs, a little water, earth four inches deep, about three hours. Lewis tasted it and found it more tender than roast or boiled meat, “but the strong flavor of the pine distroyed it for my pallate.” Ordway’s comparison is the enlisted key:
they cooked it in the Same manner as they Swet their commass roots
The six-thumbed scalp, May 15
The trophy is Gass’s May 15, not May 14. While the party put up sail-cloth and grass shelters, a visitor
had round his neck the scalp of an Indian, with six thumbs and four fingers of the other Indians he had killed in battle, of the Sho-sho-ne, or Snake nation.
Gass adds that the Chopunnish and Shoshone “have been long at war and destroyed a great many of each other in a few years past,” then describes the war-mallet — a club with a wooden or stone head, the stone heads covered with leather and sinew. A printer’s footnote in the 1807 Pittsburgh edition (David McKeehan) compares a similar stone head later seen near the Allegheny; that note is McKeehan’s, not a field sentence. Ordway on the 15th does not mention the scalp. He has a white bear chased on horseback and not killed, a shelter over the old cellar “so as in case of an alarm we can jump in the celler and defend ourSelves,” a bowery for the officers to write in, and five gallons of bear oil kegged for the mountains. Lewis that day is still on bear species, deer-head decoys, and the swollen geldings.
Read across four pens, these two days are the making of Camp Chopunnish: a defensive hollow on the Clearwater, horses cut so they would travel, bear oil for the snow, and one ethnographic page in Gass that the captains, busy with chiefs, species, and surgery, did not write.
