The expedition’s Sunday at Camp Chopunnish, the so-called Long Camp on the Clearwater, was outwardly unremarkable: a hunter returned empty-handed, visitors arrived from a neighboring band, the men ran races and danced. Yet the four surviving accounts — by Patrick Gass, John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis — diverge sharply in scope and emphasis, and read together they show how information moved (and was filtered) through the captains’ shared journal practice.
Four Registers, One Day
Gass, writing in the terse sergeant’s register that characterizes his published narrative, compresses the day into a few lines. He notes that “a hunter, who had been out, returned without killing any thing,” records the natives’ opinion that the mountains remain impassable, and adds the practical detail that the party intends to “remove a short distance to where the hunting is better.” Strikingly, Gass is the only narrator who mentions the planned shift of camp.
Ordway, by contrast, foregrounds the social texture of the day. His entry preserves details the captains omit entirely:
number of the natives visited us and gave Frazer a fine young horse a number of the natives joined and got out our canoe which was sank, our party exercised themselves running and playing games called base1 in the evening danced after the fiddle as the Indians were anxious to see them.
The gift horse to Robert Frazer, the cooperative recovery of a sunken canoe, and the observation that the Nez Perce were “anxious to see” the men dance — none of these appear in Lewis’s or Clark’s much longer entries. Ordway’s account is a useful corrective to the captains’ tendency to record diplomacy and ethnography while passing over the smaller currents of camp life.
Clark and Lewis: Parallel Texts
The Clark and Lewis entries for June 8 are a textbook case of the captains’ interlocking journal practice. Both open with Drouillard’s failed hunt and his runaway horse; both report the recovery of the sick chief and the child; both describe the visit of Cutnose with ten or twelve warriors, including two men of a band “whom we had not before Seen” (Clark) / “whom we have not previously seen” (Lewis). Both record the same horse trade involving the tomahawk Clark had originally exchanged with the Clahclellah chief at the rapids of the Columbia.
The verbal parallels are close enough to indicate one man worked from the other’s draft, but the differences are revealing. Lewis supplies ethnographic precision Clark lacks: he names the visiting band the “Y-e-let-pos” and identifies the band the party has been most familiar with as the “pel-late-pal-ler.” Clark’s version flattens these into generic “tribes from the plains of Lewis’s river.” Lewis also adds a medical update on Bratton — “he has had a tedious illness which he boar with much fortitude and firmness” — that Clark does not mention at all.
Clark, for his part, is slightly more concrete about the horse trades, specifying that the broken-down horse received in the tomahawk exchange “was not able to Cross the mountains.” Lewis omits this practical detail.
Prisoner’s Base and the Coming Mountains
All three of the longer narrators describe the foot races and the game of prisoner’s base, but only Lewis articulates the captains’ reasoning:
the men divided themselves into two parties and played prison base, by way of exercise which we wish the men to take previously to entering the mountain; in short those who are not hunters have had so little to do that they are geting reather lazy and slouthfull.
Here Lewis discloses the strategic frame — physical conditioning for the Bitterroot crossing — that turns Ordway’s casual note about “exercised themselves” into purposeful preparation. Lewis is also alone in remarking on Indigenous athleticism, observing that one Nez Perce runner “proved as fleet as Drewer and R. Fields, our swiftest runners.”
The day’s most consequential exchange, however, is the warning relayed by one of the visitors: the snow on the mountains will not permit a crossing until the full of the next moon, around the first of July, and a premature attempt would leave the horses three days without forage on the summit. Clark and Lewis record this warning in nearly identical language and respond with nearly identical resolve to depart anyway around the middle of June. Lewis frames the decision more sharply — “as we have no time to loose we will wrisk the chanches” — while Clark simply notes that the information “admits of Some doubt.” Within ten days the party would attempt the crossing, fail, and be forced to retreat: the only such reversal of the entire expedition. The Nez Perce, on this Sunday in June, had been right.
