The entries for June 7, 1806, written from Camp Chopunnish on the Clearwater (which Lewis and Clark call the Flat Head river), illustrate how a single day’s events refract through four very different journalistic temperaments. The expedition was nearing the end of its long wait for the Bitterroot snows to melt, and the men were occupied with the practical work of readying packs, ropes, and provisions for the crossing. All four journalists — Patrick Gass, John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis — note the trading errand to the Nez Perce village across the river. Only the captains, however, expand the day into natural history.
The Same Errand, Four Registers
Gass, who was himself a member of the trading party, gives the briefest account of the crossing:
I went over with five of our party to the village, on the other side of the river; and while we were going some snow fell. The greater part of the natives were out hunting.
Ordway, who remained in camp, condenses the same event into a single weather-and-result line, noting that the men returned with “Some uppah and couse &C.” — the Nez Perce roots that were becoming staples of the party’s diet. His brevity is characteristic: Ordway tracks who went where and what came back.
Clark and Lewis, by contrast, give nearly parallel paragraphs naming the traders individually — Shabono (Charbonneau), Sergeant Gass, McNeal, Whitehouse, and Goodrich — and itemizing the trade goods: “old peces of Sane, fish gig, peces of iron, bullets, and old files,” as Clark lists them, offered “for ropes and Strings for to lash their loads, and bags to Cary their roots in.” Lewis’s wording is so close to Clark’s that the two captains were plainly working from a shared conversation or shared draft, a pattern familiar throughout the return journey. Both note the disappointing yield: “a String each only,” in Clark’s phrasing, and no bags at all.
All four narrators record the gift of a horse from the Nez Perce leader Hohastillpilp to the private Robert Frazier, who had earlier given him a pair of Canadian shoe-packs. Gass adds a humanizing detail the captains omit — that Frazier “is very fond of conversing with them and of learning their language,” a glimpse of one enlisted man’s curiosity that survives only because Gass thought to mention it.
Lewis the Botanist, Clark the Ornithologist
Where the journals diverge most strikingly is in their second halves. Clark devotes the bulk of his entry to a meticulous description of a small bird — almost certainly a western tanager — measured to the quarter-inch:
it measures 7 inches from the extremity of the beak to that of the tail, the latter Occupying 21/2 inches… the plumage is remarkably delicate; that of the neck and head is of a fine orrange yellow and red… the red has the Appearance of haveing been laid over a Ground of yellow.
The painterly observation about red “laid over a Ground of yellow” is unusual for Clark, whose prose more often runs to geography and logistics. He counts the tail feathers (twelve), notes the arrangement of the toes, and records the curvature of the upper mandible.
Lewis, on the same day, turns instead to a wild cherry — likely the bitter cherry (Prunus emarginata) — and produces a description that reads like a formal botanical diagnosis: cortex, petiole, peduncle, bracted secondary peduncles, calix, and petals are all named with technical precision. He compares the fruit to a Kentish cherry and the growth habit to the choke cherry, situating the new species against familiar Eastern reference points.
The division of labor here is suggestive. On a day when both captains had time to write at length, Clark took the bird and Lewis took the plant — a quiet specialization that recurs in the later weeks of the journey, even though Lewis is generally credited as the expedition’s principal naturalist.
What Each Narrator Preserves
Read together, the four entries form a layered record. Ordway preserves the camp’s pulse — weather, who left, who came back. Gass preserves a fellow soldier’s character. Clark and Lewis preserve the diplomatic specifics of trade with the Nez Perce and, between them, two careful scientific descriptions that would otherwise be lost. The cross-narrator pattern at Camp Chopunnish is not one of contradiction but of complementary attention: each pen catches what the others let pass.
