September 22, 1805 marked one of the most consequential transitions of the entire expedition: the Corps of Discovery’s emergence from the snow-bound Bitterroot Mountains into the relative plenty of the Weippe Prairie and the Nez Perce villages. Four expedition journalists left accounts of this day, and the differences between them reveal as much about each narrator’s habits of mind as about the events themselves.
Registers of Relief
Meriwether Lewis frames the descent in self-consciously literary language, openly acknowledging the limits of expression:
the pleasure I now felt in having tryumphed over the rocky Mountains and decending once more to a level and fertile country where there was every rational hope of finding a comfortable subsistence for myself and party can be more readily conceived than expressed, nor was the flattering prospect of the final success of the expedition less pleasing.
Patrick Gass, writing in a plainer idiom, reaches for a simile drawn from his own experience of travel and hardship:
there was as much joy and rejoicing among the corps, as happens among passengers at sea, who have experienced a dangerous and protracted voyage, when they first discover land on the long looked for coast.
The two passages converge on the same emotional content—deliverance—but their rhetorical strategies diverge sharply. Lewis claims ineffability; Gass reaches for a comparison his readers will know. John Ordway, characteristically, registers the relief implicitly through accumulating sensory detail: the men "eat hearty of the Sammon and bread," the timber is "handsome tall large pitch pine," the natives are "very glad to see us ran meetting us with some root bread." William Clark, who had reached the village a day earlier, reports the moment of reunion almost clinically: "at Dark met Capt Lewis Encamped at the first Village men much fatigued & reduced."
What Each Narrator Notices
The four entries diverge sharply in what they preserve. Gass alone reports the dramatic incident of the falling horse:
One of our horses fell down the precipice about 100 feet, and was not killed, nor much hurt: the reason was, that there is no bottom below, and the precipice, the only bank, which the creek has; therefore the horse pitched into the water, without meeting with any intervening object, which could materially injure him.
This passage shows Gass’s distinctive tendency toward mechanical and causal explanation—he reasons through why the horse survived. Clark, by contrast, records his own equestrian misadventure with terse self-deprecation: "this young horse in fright threw himself & me 3 times on the Side of a Steep hill & hurt my hip much." Lewis omits both incidents entirely, but uniquely notes that the Nez Perce women fled at the party’s approach—"a circumstance I did not expect as Capt. Clark had previously been with them and informed them of our pacific intentions." Ordway alone gives a careful technical description of camas preparation: "they have kills engeanniously made where they Sweet [sweat] these roots and make them Sweet and good to the taste."
The Geography of Information
Clark’s entry is the most administratively significant of the four. While Lewis is celebrating triumph and Gass is counting miles (he records exactly 17), Clark is gathering intelligence. He records that he "got the Twisted hare to draw the river from his Camp down… on a white Elk Skin," receiving from the Nez Perce chief a sketch map measured in "sleeps" that extends all the way to the falls of the Columbia and the "Establishments of white people." Clark also notes the linguistic obstacle that will shape the coming weeks: "we attempted to have Some talk with those people but Could not for the want of an Interpreter thro which we Could Speake, we were Compelled to converse Altogether by Signs."
Ordway’s entry contains a footnote, supplied by his nineteenth-century editors, identifying the "flat head nation" as the Nez Perce and citing Clark’s September 20 entry: "They call themselves Cho punnish or Pierced noses." The slippage in Ordway’s terminology—calling them Flatheads—is itself revealing. Ordway records what he hears the men around him say; Clark records what the people call themselves. The cross-narrator pattern that emerges across these four entries is consistent with their habits throughout the expedition: Lewis composes for posterity, Clark gathers usable intelligence, Gass narrates with an artisan’s eye for cause and effect, and Ordway accumulates the textures of daily encounter.
