The journals of June 6, 1806, written from Camp Chopunnish on the Kooskooske while the expedition awaited the melting of snow in the Bitterroots, offer an unusually clear case study in how four narrators distributed their attention across a single day. Patrick Gass, John Ordway, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark all recorded the same trading expedition across the river and the same diplomatic visit to the Broken Arm, but each chose a different center of gravity.
Parallel Texts: Clark’s Council and Lewis’s Borrowing
The most conspicuous textual relationship of the day is between the Lewis and Clark entries. Clark, who actually visited the Broken Arm with Drouillard and three other men, produced the original report of the council. Lewis, remaining in camp without an interpreter (“Drewyer being absent with Capt. C.”), reconstructed the meeting from Clark’s account. The two passages on the Nez Perce timetable for crossing the mountains are nearly identical in wording. Clark writes:
The broken Arm informed me that the nation would not pass the mountains untill the latter part of the Summer, and with respect to the young men who we had requested to accompany us to the falls of Missouri, were not yet Selected for that purpose nor could they be So untill they had a Meeting of the Nation in Council.
Lewis’s version follows the same sentence structure almost verbatim, substituting “scelected” and condensing only slightly. The shared closing line — that the men trading across the river obtained roots and bread “in exchange for a number of little notions, using the Yanke phrase, with which their own enginuity had principally furnished them” — appears in both journals with matching idiosyncratic spelling. This is one of the clearer instances in the late expedition of Lewis writing from Clark’s notes rather than independent observation.
Yet Clark preserves diplomatic material that Lewis omits entirely. Only Clark records the Broken Arm’s account of Shoshone emissaries arriving at the Ye-E-al-po Nation, the chief’s intention to meet them at Lewis’s river and “Smoke the pipe of peace,” and the gift of two pipes — one of which Clark decorated “with blue ribon and white wampom” as “the emblem of peace with us.” This entire diplomatic exchange, the most consequential event of the day, is absent from Lewis’s journal.
Ordway’s Independent Intelligence and Gass’s Compression
John Ordway’s entry is short but contains information neither captain records in the same form. Ordway notes that a man who had stayed at the Commeap village the previous night returned with word that “5 of the Sho-Sho-nee of Snake nation had come to make peace or treaty with this nation.” Where Clark heard the Shoshone news through the Broken Arm’s formal narrative, Ordway received it through the rank-and-file information network of men quartered in Nez Perce villages. The two accounts converge on the same diplomatic development from opposite directions.
Ordway also identifies the visitor who returned with Clark in the evening as “the young chief who gave us Several horses,” cross-referenceable to Lewis’s mention of “Hohastillpilp the two young Cheifs who gave us the horses in behalf of the nation some time since.” The sergeants and the captains were tracking the same individuals under partially overlapping designations.
Patrick Gass, by contrast, reduces the day to a single sentence: five men crossed the river, bought roots, and returned with natives in the evening. Gass’s published 1807 narrative consistently operates at this level of compression, and June 6 illustrates the editorial trade-off — readability at the cost of nearly every concrete detail the other three narrators preserve.
Lewis’s Divergence: The Bird and the River
What distinguishes Lewis’s entry is not the diplomatic material he shares with Clark but the natural-history observations he adds at the end. Lewis turns from the council to the Kooskooske itself:
The Kooskooske is about 150 Yds. wide at this place and discharges a vast body of water; notwithstanding it high state the water remains nearly transparent, and it’s temperature appeas to be quite as cold as that of our best springs.
He then launches into a careful description of “a beautifull little bird,” measuring it at seven inches, comparing its beak to that of the Virginia nightingale, and recording the contrast between the brown upper chap and “greenish yellow” lower chap. None of the other three narrators mentions the bird or the river’s hydrology. This is the characteristic register difference between Lewis and his colleagues during the long camp: while Clark transacts with chiefs and Ordway tracks intelligence, Lewis converts idle days into measured natural history. The diplomatic sentences he borrows from Clark; the ornithology is his alone.
