The journals for 3 May 1806 capture the Corps of Discovery pushing northeast across the high plains toward Lewis’s River (the Snake), buffeted by a southwesterly storm and reduced to dividing the last of their dried meat. Four narrators — Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway — independently record the day, but the texts themselves reveal how information moved within the captains’ tent and how it was filtered through the enlisted men’s plainer prose.
The Captains in Near-Perfect Parallel
The entries by Lewis and Clark are, line for line, among the most closely matched in the entire expedition record for this period. Both open identically — “This morning we set out at 7 A.M. steered N. 25 E 12 ms. to Kimooenem Creek through a high level plain” — and proceed through the same compass bearings, the same descriptions of the creek bottoms, and the same ethnographic note on We-ark-koomt. Lewis writes of the Nez Perce chief:
he is the 1st Cheif of a large band of the Chopunnish nation. he had 10 of his young men with him. this man went down Lewis’s river by land as we decended it by water last fall quite to the Columbia and I beleive was very instrumental in procuring us a hospitable and friendly reception among the natives.
Clark’s version is virtually word-for-word identical, with only spelling variants (“Cheif”/”Chief,” “decended”/”descended,” “hospital”/”hospitable”). The pattern — established repeatedly across 1805–1806 — suggests one captain drafted and the other copied, or both worked from a shared field note. The convergence is so complete that even an arithmetic detail (“we came 28 miles today”) is preserved verbatim.
Gass and Ordway: Compression and Color
Sergeant Gass, whose journal was prepared for publication and tends toward concise narrative, strips away the bearings and ethnography. He records simply that “when the horses were collected one was found missing, and one of our hunters went back after him” — a detail the captains omit entirely. Gass also captures the bleak commissary situation in plainer language than Lewis or Clark allow themselves:
we… eat the last of our dried meat; and are altogether without other provisions, as our stock of dogs is exhausted, and we can kill no game in these plains.
Where Lewis softens the same fact into the formal “we made but a scant supper, and had not any thing for tomorrow,” Gass states the dietary crisis directly. Ordway, meanwhile, offers the most texturally vivid account of the weather, noting hail and snow “intermixed” through the night and morning, and recording a transaction the captains pass over: “bought the only dog the Indians had with them.” Ordway alone preserves this small commercial detail, which underscores how thoroughly the expedition had exhausted its provisioning options.
Naming, Hobbles, and the Big Horn Chief
All four narrators register the meeting with We-ark-koomt, but with telling differences. Lewis and Clark give him his Nez Perce name and explain the bighorn ornament on his left arm; Ordway calls him “the big horn chief who we Saw at the big forks last fall” — a phrasing rooted in the enlisted men’s memory of place rather than in formal ethnography. Gass renders him generically as “a chief and nine of his men,” reducing the encounter to its diplomatic essentials. The discrepancy in the count of accompanying men (Lewis and Clark: ten; Gass: nine) is the kind of small divergence that surfaces whenever the captains’ shared draft is compared with an independent observer.
A similar pattern attends the morning’s lost horse. Ordway specifies that “one of the hunters horses broke his hobbles and got away” and that the hunters “had found the lost horse a long distance back the road.” Gass corroborates this. Lewis and Clark, focused on bearings and the meeting with We-ark-koomt, do not mention the incident at all — a reminder that the captains’ synchronized prose, however authoritative, is not comprehensive. The sergeants’ journals remain indispensable for the granular texture of camp life: hobbles, hunters doubling back, and the precise inventory of what could and could not be eaten.
