The expedition’s return to the Quamash Flats — the prairie where they had first encountered the Chopunnish (Nez Perce) the previous autumn — produced four journal entries that, read side by side, expose how dramatically the same day could be filtered through different sensibilities and editorial habits. The party had set out at 11 A.M. with each man well mounted and a second horse for baggage, forded the difficult Collins’s Creek, and encamped on the eastern border of the flats to lay in meat before attempting the snow-bound mountains a second time.
The Captains in Lockstep
Lewis and Clark’s entries for this date are among the clearest examples in the entire journals of one captain copying the other — or both copying a shared field draft. The botanical inventory of the country between the Clearwater and the flats appears in nearly identical wording in both. Lewis writes of
a growth which resembles the pappaw in it’s leaf and which bears a burry with five valves of a deep perple colour, two speceis of shoemate sevenbark, perple haw, service berry, goosburry, a wild rose honeysuckle which bears a white berry, and a species of dwarf pine which grows about ten or twelve feet high.
Clark’s list runs:
two species of Shoemate, Seven bark, perple haw, Service berry, Goose berry, wildrose, honey suckle which bears a white berry, and a Species of dwarf pine which grows about 10 or 12 feet high.
The order, the descriptive phrasing about the dwarf pine’s fascicles of two needles, and the comparison of its rose-apples to those of garden roses are all preserved between the two. Where they diverge is telling. Clark notes that the overtaking party of Indians numbered eight and met them “before we were reached the top of the river hills”; Lewis says simply “before we were overtaken” and places the meeting at Collins’s Creek. Lewis alone closes the day with a culinary observation absent from Clark’s text — the burrowing squirrels around camp, of which he ate and found “quite as tender and well flavored as our” (the entry breaks off mid-comparison). The shared botanical core points to a collaborative natural-history project; the small divergences show each captain still composing independently around it.
Ordway’s Independent Eye
Sergeant Ordway’s entry, by contrast, owes nothing to the captains’ draft. Where Lewis and Clark catalogue species, Ordway measures and assesses the land as a potential settler might:
this level consists of about 2000 ackers of level Smooth prarie on which is not a tree or Shreub, but the lowest parts is covred with commass which is now all in blossom, but is not good untill the Stalk is dead, then the natives assemble and collect their winters food in a short time
This is ethnobotanical observation the captains do not record on this date — the timing of the Nez Perce camas harvest, the dependence of palatability on the dying stalk, the convenience of nearby pitch-pine timber for village sites. Ordway also describes the soil as “deep black & verry rich & easy for cultervation,” a frontier appraisal in the agricultural register. His route description (“ascended a high hill then decended it down on Collins Creek forded it and ascended a high hill”) is also more sequential and physical than the captains’ compass-bearing version.
An editorial footnote embedded in Ordway’s text quotes Lewis on footraces run that evening between expedition men and Nez Perce, observing that one Indian “proved as fleet as Drewyer and R. Fields, our swiftest runners,” after which the men played prison base because “those who are not hunters have had so little to do that they are geting reather lazy and slouthfull.” This vivid scene of pre-mountain conditioning appears nowhere in Lewis’s or Clark’s journal entries for the date as transmitted here — a reminder that surviving manuscript layers do not always agree.
Gass: The Plain Style
Patrick Gass, as so often, compresses the day to its essentials. His entire entry runs only a few lines, recording the twelve-mile march, the encampment, and one detail the captains do not foreground:
The com-mas grows in great abundance on this plain; and at this time looks beautiful, being in full bloom with flowers of a pale blue colour.
Where Lewis and Clark itemize roses and dwarf pines, Gass offers a single aesthetic image — a blue prairie in bloom. His report that the hunters “had killed one deer” matches Clark’s and Lewis’s accounts of Collins’s doe, though Ordway suggests others were wounded as well.
The four entries together demonstrate the layered character of the expedition’s record: a shared captains’ botany, an independent sergeant’s ethnography and land assessment, and a carpenter’s spare image of a flowering plain — all describing the same camp on the eve of the mountains.
