The journals of June 3, 1806, offer an unusually clear demonstration of how the four working diarists at Camp Chopunnish—Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway—divided narrative labor. The captains produce nearly identical strategic entries; Gass distills the day to weather and game; Ordway alone preserves a personal transaction with a Nez Perce trader. Together the four entries show the expedition’s record-keeping system functioning as a layered archive rather than a redundancy.
The Captains in Parallel
Lewis and Clark’s entries for June 3 are, as so often in the later expedition, near-twins. Both open with the convalescents. Lewis writes that Bratton is much stronger and can walk about with considerable ease
; Clark records the same line with only orthographic variation (bratten is much Stronger and can walk about with Considerable ease
). Both describe the Nez Perce chief’s gradual recovery, the child’s healing neck, and the continued use of the onion poultice.
A small but telling divergence appears in their description of the child’s ailment. Lewis, the more clinically inclined writer, calls it an imposthume
—an abscess—and notes that it has in a great measure subsided and left a hard lump underneath his left ear.
Clark renders the same observation in plainer language: the inflomation on his neck Continus but the Swelling appears to Subside.
Lewis also names the Flathead band specifically as the Oote-lash-shoots
, while Clark refers to them only as a band of Flat-Heads.
The pattern is consistent with their broader collaboration: Lewis supplies ethnographic and medical specificity; Clark, copying or composing in parallel, prioritizes the operational narrative.
Both captains converge on the day’s central decision. Having learned that the Nez Perce themselves had dispatched an express across the Bitterroots to gather news from the Flatheads wintering near Travellers Rest, the captains weighed an early crossing and rejected it. Clark records the chiefs’ caution that Several of the Creek’s would yet swim our horses, that there was no grass and that the road was extreemly deep and slipery.
The resolution: remove to the quamash grounds beyond Collins’s Creek on June 10, hunt, and attempt the mountains by mid-month.
Gass’s Compression and a River That Breathes
Sergeant Patrick Gass, whose published 1807 journal often reduces the captains’ lengthy entries to a few sentences, here ignores the medical bulletin and the strategic council entirely. Instead he captures something neither captain mentions: the diurnal rhythm of the Clearwater. The river rises in the night and falls in the day time,
Gass writes, which is occasioned by the snow melting by the heat of the sun on the mountains, which are too distant for the snow water to reach this place until after night.
This is a genuine observational contribution. The captains, fixated on whether the river will fall enough to yield salmon, do not articulate the physical mechanism. Gass—or his editor David McKeehan—produces a small piece of hydrological reasoning that complements rather than duplicates the captains’ record. Gass closes briefly with the hunters’ return: three hunters came in with the meat of five deer and a small bear.
The captains name those hunters: Colter, Joseph Fields, and Willard.
Ordway’s Private Transaction
John Ordway’s entry is the day’s outlier and arguably its most human document. Where the captains write institutionally and Gass writes meteorologically, Ordway writes personally. He alone records a horse trade conducted on his own account: his mount, ridden to the Kooskooskee tributary, had nearly failed and his back verry sore and poor & in low Spirits.
an Indian brought me a large good strong horse and Swaped with me as he knew my horse to be good when in order to run the buffaloe which is their main object to git horses that will run and Swap their best horses for Servis, for them that will run if they are not half as good as otherways.
The passage is a small ethnographic observation that escapes both captains: Nez Perce horse-traders prized buffalo-running speed so highly that they would exchange a sound, serviceable animal for a faster one in poorer condition. Ordway records this as practical knowledge gained through transaction rather than interview. Neither Lewis nor Clark, despite their extended ethnographic notes on Nez Perce horsemanship during the Long Camp weeks, captures this preference structure with Ordway’s economy.
A Layered Record
Read together, the four entries for June 3 reveal the expedition’s documentary practice at its most efficient. The captains produce the official narrative—patients, diplomacy, logistics, salmon disappointment. Gass, writing for a different audience, salvages an environmental observation the captains overlooked. Ordway preserves the texture of daily exchange with the Nez Perce hosts. The day at Long Camp looks different through each pen, and the historical record is richer for the overlap.
