Stalled at Weippe Prairie awaiting Nez Perce guides who would lead them back over the Bitterroots, the Corps of Discovery spent June 22, 1806, hunting the camas flats and dispatching a man to the Kooskooske for salmon. Four journalists recorded the day, and the gap between their entries — in tally, in tone, and in textual dependence — is unusually instructive.
Two Captains, One Pen
The entries by William Clark and Meriwether Lewis are, with trivial exceptions, the same paragraph. Clark opens:
This morning by light all hands who Could hunt were Sent out, the result of the days performance was greater than we had even hopes for. we killed eight Deer and three Bear.
Lewis writes:
this morning by light all hands who could hunt were sent out; the result of this days perfomance was greater than we had even hoped for. we killed eight deer and three bear.
The substantive content — the dispatching of Whitehouse to the Kooskooske above Collins’s Creek to purchase salmon, the weather note on the cool previous evening and the pleasant N.W. breeze, the absence of Drewyer, Shannon, and Whitehouse at nightfall, and Potts’s inflamed leg treated with a poultice of cous root — is identical. Even the small narrative grace note about the beads is shared, though with a telling pronoun shift. Clark records that "I unexpectedly found" the beads "in one of my waistcoat pockets," while Lewis attributes the same discovery to "Capt. C." This is one of the clearer instances in the late expedition journals of one captain copying from the other and adjusting only the speaker’s perspective; the direction of borrowing — Clark to Lewis, or a shared draft — has long been debated by editors of the journals.
The Enlisted Men’s Ledger
John Ordway’s entry confirms the captains’ figures on deer but disagrees sharply on bear. Ordway records that the morning hunters brought in "eight deer and two brown bear," with Collins later killing "a black bear" in the evening — a total of three bears, but distinguished by species and by the time of kill. The captains collapse this into a single round number. Ordway also independently notes the salmon errand, writing that "one man Set out to go over to the kooskooskee river for Salmon as the 2 Indians told us they catch pleanty at this time." Where Lewis and Clark frame the dispatch as a command decision, Ordway preserves the Nez Perce informants who prompted it.
Patrick Gass, by contrast, records a wholly different day. He writes:
At noon the hunters came in, but had killed nothing but one small pheasant. In the evening they made another excursion, but were unsuccessful.
Gass appears to have remained in camp with the Indians ("the Indians remained with me at the camp") and reports only what he personally witnessed at the noon and evening returns. His "one small pheasant" cannot be reconciled with Ordway’s eight deer and two bears arriving at the same hour. The likeliest explanation is that Gass is recording a different sub-party of hunters — perhaps those who returned to the main camp where he sat — while the bulk of the meat was processed elsewhere on the prairie. It is also possible Gass, writing his journal up later from memory or terse notes, simply confused this day with another lean one; his published 1807 narrative was edited from field notes and is known to compress events.
What Each Narrator Sees
The day’s cross-narrator pattern is characteristic of the return journey. The captains write in near-lockstep, producing a consolidated official record in which Clark’s spelling ("Kooskooke," "precure," "fiew") and Lewis’s ("Kooskooske," "procure," "few") are the chief tells. Ordway, writing independently, supplies the species detail and the indigenous source of intelligence that the captains omit. Gass, the carpenter-sergeant whose published journal would reach the public years before Lewis and Clark’s, offers the narrowest field of view — a reminder that the expedition’s record is not a single voice but a layered set of partial witnesses, and that even on a quiet camp day the totals do not always add up.
Potts’s leg, poulticed with cous root learned from the Nez Perce, would continue to trouble him in the days ahead.
