The journals of May 13, 1806 capture a deceptively simple day: the Corps gathered sixty horses, descended a creek roughly four miles to the Kooskooske River, and waited for a promised canoe that did not arrive until after sunset. Yet the four surviving accounts — by Patrick Gass, John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis — diverge sharply in emphasis, revealing the working habits of each writer and the editorial collaboration between the two captains.
The Enlisted Men’s Eye for Terrain and Property
Gass and Ordway, the two sergeants, produce closely parallel entries focused on the day’s movement and the country traversed. Both record the same horse count and condition. Gass writes that the party found they had "60 and all pretty good except 4, which were studs and had sore backs," while Ordway notes "all our horses 60 in number now together and all good except 4 which has Sore backs." Both men describe the creek as a "bold" rapid stream of about fifteen yards, lined with cottonwood and cherry.
Where they diverge is telling. Gass, the carpenter-turned-sergeant whose published journal aimed at a general readership, omits the Nez Perce gambling scene that Ordway records in vivid material detail:
a number of the natives went at playing the game as those below had considerable property up on each Side Such as beed[s] Strips of otter Skins which was filled with rich Shells, trinkets & Spanish bridles &C.
Ordway’s mention of "Spanish bridles" is the kind of concrete trade-network detail that often slips past Gass’s tidier prose. Ordway also notes "we Swapped several horses with them," a transactional fact neither captain bothers to mention.
The Captains in Tandem
Clark and Lewis, by contrast, treat May 13 as an occasion for a long ethnographic set-piece on the Chopunnish (Nez Perce). Their entries on this subject are nearly identical in wording — a familiar pattern in the late expedition, where the two men shared notes and one frequently transcribed from the other. Compare Clark:
The Chopunnish are in general Stout well formd active men. they have high noses and maney of them on the acqueline order with chearfull and agreeable countinances
with Lewis:
The Chopunnish are in general stout well formed active men. they have high noses and many of them on the acqueline order with cheerfull and agreeable countenances
The agreement extends paragraph after paragraph, through the description of dress, ornaments, gambling, archery at "a targit made of Willow bark" (Clark) or "a bowling target made of willow bark" (Lewis), and the famous remark that blue beads "may be justly compared to gold and Silver among civilized nations." The two captains are clearly working from a shared draft, with Lewis offering small refinements — for instance his ironic aside that several Chopunnish men, "if they had shaved their beards instead of extracting it would have been as well supplyed in this particular as any of my countrymen," a sentence absent from Clark’s parallel passage.
Details Only One Narrator Catches
Some observations appear in only one journal. Clark alone records the chilling description of Hohastillpilp’s regalia:
I observed a tippet worn by Hohastillpilp, which was formed of Humane Scalps and ornemented with the thumbs and fingers of Several men which he had Slain in battle.
Lewis omits this detail entirely, despite their otherwise shared text — a reminder that even when the captains synchronized their entries, each retained idiosyncratic observations. Lewis alone supplies the precise marching course ("S. E." then "nearly N. about 1½ miles") and the "stout branch" entering from the right at one mile, the kind of surveyor’s specificity that distinguishes his prose from Clark’s more narrative register.
Gass, finally, is the only narrator to specify which side of the river the party encamped on: "At dark the canoe came, but it being too late to cross we encamped on the south side." Ordway and the captains leave the bank unstated. Across four pens, then, a single uneventful day of waiting yields a layered record — sergeants attending to horses, property, and geography; captains laboring over a joint ethnographic portrait of the people who had sheltered them through a long Idaho spring.
