June 5, 1806 finds the Corps of Discovery still pinned at Camp Chopunnish on the Clearwater (Kooskee), waiting for the Bitterroot snows to subside. The day produced no dramatic geographic advance, but it generated four distinct journal entries whose differences illuminate how the expedition’s record was actually constructed — by hand, by hierarchy, and by habit.
Lewis Composes, Clark Copies
The most striking feature of this date is the near-identity of Lewis’s and Clark’s entries. Lewis’s botanical survey of the grasses around Long Camp — a tall moist-ground species resembling “the maden cain as it is called in the state of Gergia,” a tussock grass like the “Corn grass in the Southern states, and the foxtail in Virginia,” a cheat-like third species, and a blue grass that “appears to bear the frosts and snow better than any grass in our country” — appears in Clark’s journal in almost the same order, with the same comparisons, and frequently the same phrasing.
Clark writes:
a fouth and most prevalent Species is a grass which appears to be the Same Called the blue Grass common to maney parts of the United States; it is common to the bottoms as well as the uplands, is now Seeding and is from 9 inches to 2 feet high; it affords an excellent paterage for horses and appears to bear the frost and Snow better than any grass in our Country
Lewis’s version is identical in substance, differing only in spelling (“pasture” for “paterage,” “speceis” for “Species”). The pattern is consistent with what scholars have long observed for the return journey: Clark systematically transcribed Lewis’s natural-history observations into his own field book, sometimes adding small details. Here Clark adds two items to the plant list — “Strawberries, Raspberries, Goose berries” and “water penerial” — and inserts a clinical note Lewis omits, that the chief’s child received “a plaster of Sarve made of the Rozen of the long leafed pine, Beas wax and Beare oil mixed.” Lewis describes the same treatment as “a plaster of basilicon,” using the apothecary’s term for what Clark records as its frontier recipe. The register difference is telling: Lewis reaches for the pharmacopoeia, Clark for the ingredients.
Ordway Preserves What the Captains Omit
Neither captain mentions the visiting Nez Perce rider whose story dominates the enlisted men’s entries. Patrick Gass notes only that “An Indian came with them, who had been part of the way over the mountains; but found the road too bad and the snow too deep to cross.” John Ordway preserves the fuller account:
an Indian had Set out Some days past to cross the mountains if possable but soon after dark he returned to our Camp and informed us that he went over one mountain and in attempting to cross a creek which was high and rapid his horse fell and hurt him So he turned back to wait untill the water falls
This is intelligence of the first importance — a local rider, presumably better-mounted and better-acquainted with the route than any member of the Corps, has tried and failed. It confirms the captains’ decision to wait. Yet Lewis and Clark, occupied with grasses and poultices, do not enter it. Without Ordway’s notebook, the episode would survive only in Gass’s compressed paraphrase, which loses the horse, the creek, and the rider’s intention to try again when the water falls.
Ordway also closes with a hydrological detail the captains miss: “the river kooskee is falling fast.” Clark, writing the same evening, contradicts him slightly: “The river falls in course of the day and rises Some at night.” The two observations are not incompatible — diurnal snowmelt cycles produce exactly that pattern — but only Clark records both halves.
Gass the Compressor
Gass’s entry is, as often, the briefest. He notes the heavy dew, the four hunters returning with “five more deer, and a bear,” and the Indian’s failed reconnaissance. He omits the medical work, the trade across the river, the botany, and Frazier’s unreturned errand to the Twisted Hair’s lodge. His value on this date is not detail but synthesis: in three sentences he states the day’s operative truth — “we are obliged to remain where we are some time longer” — which neither captain bothers to articulate, perhaps because for them it goes without saying.
Read together, the four entries show the expedition’s documentary division of labor in miniature: Lewis the naturalist-author, Clark the faithful redactor with a clinician’s eye, Ordway the keeper of incidents the captains pass over, and Gass the plain-spoken summarizer for whom the bottom line is always the road ahead.
