June 9, 1806, found the Corps of Discovery at Camp Chopunnish on the Clearwater (which Lewis and Clark called the Kooskooske or flathead river), poised to attempt the Bitterroot crossing. Four narrators — Lewis, Clark, Ordway, and Gass — each commit the day to paper, and the resulting entries reveal a familiar hierarchy of detail: the captains expansive, the sergeants compressed, with Ordway and Gass each preserving fragments the captains omit.
Parallel Captains, Compressed Sergeants
Lewis and Clark’s entries track each other closely, as is typical for this leg of the journey. Both open with the attempt to swap sore-backed horses; both record the departures of Hohastillpilp (Hohasillpilp in Clark’s hand) and the Broken Arm for the rendezvous on Lewis’s River; both note Cutnose’s eagle-gathering errand; both close with the falling river and the men’s restlessness. The verbal echoes are unmistakable. Clark writes:
our party exolted with the idea of once more proceeding on towards thier friends and Country are elert in all their movements and amuse themselves by pitching quates, Prisoners bast running races &c-.
Lewis renders nearly the same sentence with characteristic expansion:
our party seem much elated with the idea of moving on towards their friends and country, they all seem allirt in their movements today; they have every thing in readiness for a move, and notwithstanding the want of provision have been amusing themselves very merrily today in runing footraces pitching quites, prison basse &c.
The shared vocabulary — “elated/exolted,” “alert/elert,” the specific games of “prison base” and “quoits” — confirms the captains were either drafting in conversation or one was working from the other’s notes. Lewis, however, adds a detail Clark suppresses: “we eat the last of our meat yesterday evening and have lived on roots today.” The men’s merriment, in Lewis’s telling, is the more remarkable for being conducted on empty stomachs.
Gass and Ordway: What the Sergeants Saw
Patrick Gass, ever terse, reduces the day to its logistical core: horses gathered, hobbled, and exchanged with an eye to mountain fitness. He alone specifies that “mares with young colts, and some of the horses who had not got quite well” were among those traded — a practical observation about which animals the party judged unfit for the Bitterroots. Gass omits the chiefs’ departures, the games, the river, and the eagles entirely.
John Ordway, by contrast, opens precisely where the captains do not — with Cutnose’s eagle expedition, and with an ethnographic detail neither captain records:
a chief we call cut nose went some distance after young Eagles, got several by climbing a tree by a by a rope, the feathers of these eagles the Indians make head dresses war like & paint them & is a great thing among them
Lewis confirms only that Cutnose “returned soon after with a pair of young Eagles of the grey kind; they were nearly grown and prety well feathered,” and Clark notes the intent “to raise for their feathers.” Neither captain describes the climbing rope or the cultural significance of the feathers in headdresses and war paint. Ordway, who frequently registers Indigenous practices the captains gloss over, supplies the context that turns a curiosity into ethnography.
The River as Oracle
Clark and Lewis converge again on the meaning of the Clearwater’s falling level. Clark frames it in Nez Perce terms:
this fall of water is what the nativs have informed us was a proper token for us. when this river fell the Snows would be Sufficiently melted for us to Cross the Mountains.
Lewis offers a more cautious gloss, conceding the sign but tempering it with engineering judgment: “I do not conceive that we are as yet loosing any time as the roads is in many parts extreemly steep rocky and must be dangerous if wet and slippry; a few days will dry the roads and will also improve the grass.” The contrast is characteristic. Clark accepts the Indigenous reading as authoritative; Lewis filters it through his own assessment of trail conditions and forage. Both, however, are clearly preparing the reader — and themselves — for the imminent attempt on the mountains that had nearly destroyed them westbound.
Read together, the four entries show an expedition straining toward movement: Gass counting horses, Ordway watching a chief climb for eagles, the captains rehearsing a shared narrative of farewell, restlessness, and a river that has finally given its sign.
