The entries of May 7, 1806 capture the Corps reuniting with their horses, crossing the Kooskooske (Clearwater) River, and ascending into the rolling Nez Perce plains. Three narrators — Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sergeant John Ordway — describe the same sequence of events, but the textual relationships among them illustrate clearly how the expedition’s record was layered: the captains drafting in close concert, the sergeant writing independently and noting different details.
The Captains in Parallel
Lewis and Clark’s entries for this date are nearly word-for-word identical, a pattern common in the post-winter portion of the expedition where Clark frequently copied from Lewis or the two collaborated on a shared draft. Compare Lewis’s account of the recovered powder:
a man of this lodge produced us two canisters of powder which he informed us he had found by means of his dog where they had been buried in a bottom near the river some miles above… as he had kept them safe and had honesty enough to return them to us we gave him a fire steel by way of compensation.
Clark’s version differs only in orthography (“berried” for “buried,” “honisty” for “honesty,” capitalized “Canisters” and “Powder”):
a man of this lodge produced us two Canisters of Powder which he informed us he had found by means of his dog where they had been berried in the bottom near the river a fiew miles above… as he had kept them Safe and had honisty enough to return them to us, we gave him a fire Steel by way of Compensation.
The shared phrasing extends through the entire entry — the description of the soil as “a dark rich loam,” the country as “beautifull fertile and picteresque,” and the naming of “Musquetoe Creek” because of “swarms of those insects on our arrival at it.” Even the closing zoological observation about the mound-building “Sallemander” animal appears in both. The variations are essentially those of a copyist: Clark capitalizes nouns more freely and occasionally swaps a synonym (“forks” where Lewis writes “Chopunnish river”), but the underlying text is one document refracted through two pens.
Ordway’s Independent Register
Ordway’s entry, by contrast, shows no textual dependence on the captains. His sergeant’s-eye account is shorter, plainer, and organized around the practical rhythm of the day’s march. Where Lewis frames the powder recovery as a moral exchange — rewarding “honesty” with a fire steel — Ordway gives a more concrete and slightly different version of the find:
they told us that the dogs Scratched open the hole and they finding the powder took care of it for us. we gave them Small articles for being so honest
Ordway pluralizes the actors (“they,” “dogs”), generalizes the gift to “Small articles,” and locates the cache “about 7 miles above” — a specific distance the captains do not give. He also recalls that the powder had been hidden “as we passd down,” anchoring the recovery to the previous autumn’s descent.
Ordway’s terrain notes likewise diverge in emphasis. He records ascending “a high hill” with a view of “the rockey mountains covred with Snow,” an observation absent from the captains’ entries despite their otherwise lavish landscape description. He catalogs the vegetation in a sergeant’s inventory style — “thinly covred with pitch pine, thick grass plants wild onions, &C.” — where Lewis offers the more literary “long leafed pine” and “herbatious plants which afford a delightfull pasture for horses.” Ordway also closes with a hunting tally the captains omit: “Some of the men killed a duck & a pheasant only.”
What Each Narrator Preserves
The three entries together preserve complementary layers of the day. The captains’ shared draft supplies the diplomatic and scientific frame: the guide is “the brother of the twisted hair,” the chief Neeshneparkeeook is named, the creek is christened, and the soil and timber line are described in terms suitable for Jefferson’s eventual readers. Ordway supplies the enlisted perspective: distances remembered from the previous fall, the snowy Rockies still visible to the east, the day’s small game, and the camp at “an old In — Camp fishery or were [weir] has lately been made.” His mention of the fishing weir is a detail neither captain records, even though all three slept at the same six-lodge site.
Read together, the entries demonstrate the documentary architecture of the return journey: a captains’ text produced collaboratively and copied between Lewis and Clark, alongside an independent sergeant’s journal that quietly fills in the gaps the official record passes over.
