The 11th of May 1806 finds the Corps of Discovery encamped among the Chopunnish (Nez Perce), reclaiming horses left the previous autumn and conducting one of the more elaborate diplomatic exchanges of the return journey. Four narrators — Lewis, Clark, Ordway, and Gass — left accounts of the day, and reading them in parallel reveals not only the layered structure of expedition record-keeping but also which details each writer chose to preserve.
Twin Captains, Twin Texts
The most immediately striking pattern is the near-verbatim correspondence between the journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Both captains identify the four principal chiefs — Tunnachemootoolt, Neeshneparkkeeook, Yoomparkkartim, and Hohastillpilp — and both describe drawing a map with charcoal on a mat to communicate the United States’ intentions. Clark writes:
we drew a map of the Country with a coal on a mat in their way, and by the assistance of the Snake boy and our intrepeters were enabled to make ourselves under stood by them altho it had to pass through French, Minnetare, Shoshone and Chopunnish languages.
Lewis’s version is essentially identical in phrasing, differing only in spelling (“interpretters,” “Minnetare,” “rispect”). Both note that the chain of translation — English to French (via Charbonneau) to Hidatsa to Shoshone (via Sacagawea) to Chopunnish — “ocupyed nearly half the day.” The agreement suggests one captain copied from the other, a common practice on the return journey, though each retained his own orthographic habits and minor reorderings (Clark lists the chiefs’ rank as Tunnachemootoolt, Hohastillpilp, Neshneparkkeeook, Yoomparkkartim; Lewis places Yoomparkkartim third).
Yet small divergences matter. Lewis offers a physical description of Yoom-park-kar-tim — “a stout fellow of good countenance about 40 years of age” who “has lost the left eye” — that Clark omits, while Clark alone records the practical detail that “The twisted hair brough Six of our horses all in fine order.” Clark also catalogues the medical complaints in fuller clinical register: “Schrofla, ulsers, rhumitism, Sore eyes, and the loss of the use of their Limbs.”
The Sergeants’ Compressions
Sergeants Patrick Gass and John Ordway compress the same day into a few sentences each, and the comparison is instructive. Gass records the gift of the mare and colt and the return of the horses, but says nothing of the council, the map drawn in coal, or the demonstration of magnetism and the air gun. His framing is administrative: “the Officers practice as physicians among their sick, and they gave them a very handsome mare and colt.” The grammatical ambiguity — who gave what to whom — is characteristic of Gass’s terser style.
Ordway, by contrast, preserves a domestic detail that none of the other three records:
in the evening we fiddled and danced a while, the natives assembled to see us.
This single line restores something the captains’ diplomatic prose erases — that the day’s formal council was followed by ordinary sociability, music, and curious onlookers. Ordway also specifies that it was Clark in particular who “applyed meddison,” a precision the captains’ joint “we” obscures. He further notes that Drouillard, named only as “our hunter” by Gass, brought in two deer.
What Cross-Reading Reveals
The young chief’s gift of the mare and colt appears in all four accounts but receives its fullest articulation in Lewis and Clark, who quote (or paraphrase) the giver’s speech: he had “opened his ears” to their counsel, and “his heart was glad.” Gass mentions the mare without context; Ordway attributes a different horse-gift to Clark personally. The captains’ parallel rendering of the speech — with its idioms of opened ears and glad hearts — suggests they were jointly attentive to ceremonial language, perhaps already drafting the official record.
Taken together, the four narrators on May 11th demonstrate the stratified character of expedition documentation. Lewis and Clark provide the diplomatic and ethnographic substance, often in shared phrasing. Gass strips the day to its logistical bones — horses recovered, deer killed, medicine dispensed. Ordway alone preserves the fiddle and the dance. No single journal captures the day; the historical record exists only in their overlay.
