Stalled at the Weippe Prairie camp while waiting for Nez Perce guides willing to lead them across the still-snowbound Bitterroots, the four journal-keepers of the Corps of Discovery produced entries on June 20, 1806 that share a skeleton of facts but differ markedly in scale, register, and analytical reach. Reuben Field killed a bear; seven salmon-trout were taken; Labiche and Cruzatte returned at dusk with a single deer; the hunters warned that game could not sustain the party more than another day or two. Beyond that common core, each narrator shapes the day to his own purposes.
The Captains’ Shared Draft
Lewis and Clark’s entries are, as often in this stretch, near-twins. Both describe Reuben Field’s bear in nearly identical clinical language, identifying it by its Chopunnish name:
R. Feilds killed a brown bear the tallons of which were remarkably short broad at their base and sharply pointed this was of the speceis which the Chopunnish call Yah-kar. (Lewis)
Reubin Field killed a redish brown bear which was very meagure. the tallons of this bear was remarkably Short broad at their base and Sharply pointed, this was of the Species the Chopunnish call Yahkar. (Clark)
The parallelism extends through the long contingency plan that occupies most of both entries: a scheme by which one captain would take four expert woodsmen and three or four of the best horses two days ahead of the main body, blazing trees as they followed the rubs left by Nez Perce baggage on the trail. Two scouts would then return to Hungry Creek to report. The wording matches phrase for phrase — Clark’s “Capt. L. or myself” mirroring Lewis’s “Capt. C. or myself” — confirming what scholars have long observed about this leg of the return: one captain drafted, the other copied, with each making minor orthographic adjustments. Clark’s spelling (“meagure,” “exhosted,” “wrisk”) and Lewis’s (“speceis,” “indeavour,” “hungary”) leave individual fingerprints on otherwise shared text.
Lewis adds one note Clark omits: a comparative judgment that the lean bear’s flesh “is much inferior to lean venison or the flesh of poor Elk.” It is a small but characteristic Lewis touch — the naturalist-gourmet ranking what the hunter brings in.
The Sergeants’ Shorter View
Ordway and Gass, writing without access to the captains’ strategic deliberations, compress the day into the immediate textures of camp work. Ordway is the most precise on method, recording the improvised fishing tackle the captains only allude to:
Several men went at fishing fixed gigs of Bayonets & Indn gigs and fixed a dip net &C. and killd and caught 7 Salmon trout
Clark corroborates the bayonet-gig and “Scooping nett,” adding a snare “made of horse” hair, but it is Ordway who foregrounds the labor — the fixing, the ampersand-strung accumulation of tools — that produced the catch. Where the captains note simply that seven salmon-trout were taken, Ordway distributes them across the day: a morning haul, then Labiche and Cruzatte’s single trout brought in at evening.
Gass, writing from a slightly different chronological frame, blends the 20th into his account of the 21st and the move back toward the “Com-mas flat.” His entry is the most worldly in tone, registering miseries the captains suppress:
The musquitoes and gnats are very troublesome.
Neither Lewis nor Clark mentions insects on this date, though the prairie in late June would have swarmed with them. Gass also alone records the loss of “one of our best horses” to a snag the next day — the kind of working detail a carpenter-sergeant tracked closely and the captains, focused on the larger problem of the mountains, did not.
What the Cross-Reading Reveals
The June 20 entries form a useful case study in the Corps’ documentary ecology. The captains’ joint text carries the strategic and ethnographic weight: a Chopunnish species name, a ranked assessment of bear-flesh, and a fully articulated fallback plan should no Nez Perce guide appear. Ordway supplies the granular mechanics of subsistence — exactly how bayonets became fish-gigs. Gass, least bound to the captains’ rhetorical project, registers what bodies actually felt: gnats, a snagged horse, the wish to lay in meat enough “as will serve the party.” Read together, the four accounts show a camp that was simultaneously hungry, methodical, bitten by insects, and quietly rehearsing one of the most consequential decisions of the return journey: whether to wait for guides, or to gamble on the Bitterroots alone.
