The fourteenth of May 1806 marks the establishment of the camp the captains would occupy for nearly a month while waiting for the Bitterroot snows to melt. Four members of the Corps — Lewis, Clark, Ordway, and Gass — recorded the day’s events. Their entries describe the same sequence of activities: a baggage crossing, the swimming of the horses, the selection of a defensible site at an old sunken Nez Perce dwelling, the arrival of chiefs bearing gifts, the hunters’ return with grizzly bears, and the gelding of troublesome stallions. Yet each narrator weights these elements differently, and the variations reveal much about how the expedition’s record was constructed.
The Captains in Parallel
Lewis and Clark produce nearly mirrored entries, a pattern familiar by this stage of the journey. Both describe the camp site in almost identical language. Lewis writes that the position
was sunk about 4 feet in the ground and raised arround it’s outer edge about three 1/2 feet with a good wall of eath. the whole was a circle of about 30 feet in diameter.
Clark records the same feature as a
hollow circler Spot of about 30 feet diamieter 4 feet below the Serfce and a Bank of 2 feet above
Both captains close their site description with the same sentiment, virtually word-for-word: “as we are Compelled to reside a while in this neighbourhood I feel perfectly Satisfied with our position.” The shared phrasing confirms that one captain copied or dictated to the other — a routine practice during the return journey. Clark’s spelling (“Serfce,” “diamieter,” “Seffiently”) preserves his characteristic orthography against Lewis’s more polished hand, but the underlying observation is identical.
Where the two diverge is in social register. Lewis names the visiting chiefs in formal transliteration — Tunnachemootoolt and Hosastillpilp — and dwells on the diplomatic exchange of a grey gelding for a handkerchief, two hundred balls, and four pounds of powder. Clark gives the same gift-exchange but adds a detail Lewis omits: that Hohastillpilp was the son of “a Great Chief who was killed last year by the Big bellies of Sas kas she win river,” linking the day’s ceremony to recent Plains warfare.
The Sergeants’ Different Eyes
Ordway and Gass, writing in the enlisted-men’s register, compress the diplomacy and expand on practical matters. Ordway notes simply that “Some of the principal men gave our officers two fine horses,” passing over the names and ceremony entirely. He is, however, the only narrator to itemize the hunters’ returns by name and tally: “Collins two bear of the white kind, Labuche three white bear,” plus Shannon’s “prarie hens and Squerrells.” Where Lewis records two bears and Clark records two, Ordway’s count of five grizzlies between Collins and Labiche aligns more closely with Gass’s report that the hunters “came in with the meat of the two bears, and also our other hunters who had killed three more, all of the grizly kind.”
Gass alone gives a sustained ethnographic description of how the Nez Perce cooked the bear meat the Corps shared with them:
They first collected some stones and heated them, upon which they placed a part of the meat, and upon the meat some small brush, and so alternately meat and brush, until all the meat was on
Ordway notes the same cookery but only in passing — “they cooked it in the Same manner as they Swet their commass roots” — assuming the reader’s familiarity with camas pit-roasting. Neither captain records the cooking method at all. This is a recurring pattern: Gass, writing for eventual publication, supplies the procedural detail his officers consider beneath the dignity of an official journal.
Surgery on the Stallions
All four narrators report the gelding of the troublesome stud horses, but with revealing differences. Ordway dispatches the matter in a single blunt sentence and adds a detail no one else mentions: “we eat several of our stud horses as they have been troublesome to us.” Gass counts the operation precisely — “seven of our horses” — and notes that a Nez Perce man performed the surgery on all but one. Clark describes the technique with surgical interest, observing that the Indian “Cut them without tying the String of the Stone as is usial. he Craped it very Clean & Seperate it before he Cut it.” Lewis’s surviving entry breaks off before reaching the gelding, leaving Clark as the principal authority on the technique — a comparative observation Clark, the more practical horseman of the two captains, was best positioned to make.
Taken together, the four entries demonstrate the layered authorship of the expedition record: captains drafting in parallel and sharing language, sergeants supplying the headcounts and cooking-fire detail their officers omit, and individual temperaments — Clark’s horseman’s eye, Gass’s ethnographic curiosity, Ordway’s blunt accounting — filling in what no single narrator could capture alone.
