This analysis was generated with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor.
Stalled at the foot of the Bitterroots after their failed first attempt to cross the snow-bound mountains, the Corps of Discovery spent June 13, 1806, in the kind of holding pattern that produces revealing journal entries. With the party encamped on what is likely the Weippe Prairie, four narrators — Lewis, Clark, Ordway, and Gass — recorded the same small cluster of events: the dispatch of two hunters ahead, the return of the morning’s hunting parties, an exchange of horses with a visiting Nez Perce, and the drying of meat against the coming push over the divide. The overlap is close enough that the divergences carry weight.
The Same Day, Four Registers
Lewis and Clark, as so often in 1806, produce nearly parallel entries — almost certainly the result of one consulting the other’s draft. Both open with the order to Reubin Fields and Willard. Clark writes:
Ordered Rubin Fields and Willard to proceed on to a Small prarie in the Mountains about 8 miles and there hunt untill we arrive the Set out at 10 A.M.
Lewis renders the same fact with slightly more geographic precision, naming the landmark:
Reubin Feilds and Willard were ordered to proceed on our road to a small prarie 8 miles distant on this side of Collins’s Creek and there hunt until our arrival; they departed at 10 A.M.
The captains’ versions agree on the count of eight deer and on the buzzard episode, but Lewis alone notes that the hunters "had wounded several others and a bear but did not get them" — a detail consistent with his habitual interest in the mechanics of hunting and in unsuccessful pursuits. Clark, by contrast, names the unlucky hunters Labeech and P. Crusatt directly, where Lewis writes "Labuish and Cruzatte" without further identifying tag.
What the Sergeants See
Ordway, as is his pattern, supplies the roster the captains omit. Where Lewis says simply "seven of our hunters returned with 8 deer," Ordway names them:
Gibson Shields Shannon Collins J° Fields Drewyer Labuche and [blank space in Ms.] all the meat except Labuches was brought in & that the ravens & buzzards eat while he was hunting a little more after killing it
Ordway also alone records that "Colter killed a large crain" — a small but characteristic instance of the sergeant catching incidental kills the captains pass over. Note too that Ordway blames ravens as well as buzzards; Lewis and Clark mention only the latter. Whether Ordway saw the scene firsthand or simply reported the hunters’ own account, his version is the more zoologically inclusive.
Gass, whose entry is the briefest, omits names entirely and compresses the day into a few clauses. He alone closes with a complaint that none of the others register on this date:
In the evening the weather became cloudy. The musquitoes are very troublesome.
The mosquito note is a useful corrective to the captains’ loftier preoccupations: at the same moment Lewis was tallying Indian nations by the tens of thousands, Gass was being bitten.
The Horse Trade and the Ethnographic Digest
The exchange with the visiting Nez Perce is reported by three of the four narrators, and the variation in framing is instructive. Gass renders it as bare transaction: the Indian "exchanged horses with one of our men, whose horse had not recovered." Clark adds the consideration — "a Small ax a Knife &c" — and notes the visitor "returned to his village well Satisfied." Lewis goes further, glossing the trade with ethnographic interpretation:
he seemed much pleased with his exchange and set out immediately to his village, as if fearfull that we would cansel the bargain which is customary among themselves and deemed only fair.
This is Lewis at his most characteristic — inferring a cultural rule from a single departure. The same impulse drives the day’s other major project, which Clark mentions modestly ("I make a list of the Indian Nations their place of residence, and probable number of Soles of each nation") and which Lewis quantifies: "they amount by our estimate to 69,000." The captains were clearly working in tandem on this digest, but only Lewis records the total. It is a striking artifact of forced leisure: pinned down by snow, the expedition’s leaders compiled one of the earliest American ethnographic censuses of the trans-Rocky West.
Pattern
Across these four entries the familiar hierarchy holds. Lewis and Clark draft in close coordination, with Lewis adding interpretive overlay and Clark holding to a more administrative register. Ordway supplies the roll of names. Gass compresses, but registers the bodily texture — clouds, mosquitoes — that the officers tend to omit. On a quiet day, the layered record is what makes the moment legible.
