The journal entries dated May 29, 1806, offer an unusually clear demonstration of how the Lewis and Clark expedition divided its documentary labor at Camp Chopunnish, where the party waited for the Bitterroot snows to melt. Four narrators — Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway — produce strikingly different records of the same nominal day, ranging from terse weather notation to extended zoological description. (Ordway’s entry, it should be noted, belongs to a later date in his narrative; the editorial pagination places it under May 30, and it describes the party’s descent to a Salmon River fishery rather than activities at the Long Camp.)
Parallel Pens: Lewis and Clark in Near-Lockstep
The most arresting cross-narrator pattern is the close textual correspondence between Lewis’s and Clark’s entries. Both open with the identical formula — Lewis writes
“No movement of the party today worthy of notice. we have once more a good stock of meat and roots.”
Clark’s version differs only in capitalization and the spelling “Bratten” rather than Lewis’s “Bratton.” Both captains then report that the Nez Perce chief under their care
“washed his face himself today”
— a small act of recovered motor function that both men evidently considered worth marking after more than a year of the chief’s incapacity.
The parallelism extends into the natural-history passages. Clark’s description of the horned lizard (“a Species of Lizzard Called by the French engages, Prarie buffaloe”) tracks Lewis’s almost word for word, including the comparison to “the Common black lizzard,” the note that they “crawl much like the toad,” and the coloration of “brown Colour with yellowish and yellowish brown Spots.” The dependency runs from Lewis to Clark: Lewis’s entry continues with a sustained etymological complaint —
“I cannot conceive how the engages ever assimilated this animal with the buffaloe for there is not greater analogy than between the horse and the frog”
— and a botanical description of the choke cherry in bloom, neither of which Clark transcribes. Clark’s copy breaks off mid-description of the lizard’s belly. The pattern, repeatedly observed across the journals, is that Clark imports Lewis’s scientific prose but truncates where Lewis’s curiosity runs longer.
Gass and Ordway: The Other Registers
Patrick Gass, the carpenter-sergeant whose published 1807 narrative was the expedition’s first to reach print, offers on this day only a single sentence: the river
“is rising very fast; which gives us hopes that the snow is leaving the mountains. At 10 o’clock the river ceased rising and the weather became clear.”
Gass’s hydrological observation — keyed to the practical question of when the party can cross the Bitterroots — captures something neither captain records. Lewis and Clark mention only that it was “cloudy and frequently raining” enough to prevent another sweat treatment for the chief; Gass alone tracks the rise, peak, and clearing as a meteorological event with strategic implications.
Ordway’s entry, misdated in the editorial sequence and properly belonging to the party’s later movement toward the Salmon River fishery, operates in yet another register — the ethnographic and economic. He records that
“Frazer got 2 Spanish mill dollars from a squaw for an old razer we expect they got them from the Snake Indians who live near the Spanish country to the South.”
This is precisely the kind of trade-network detail that Lewis and Clark, absorbed in their lizard and choke cherry, do not register. Ordway also describes the protocol of the fishery lodge, where the chief instructs the party
“to set down and not go in the lodge untill we were invited”
— a notation of Indigenous diplomatic etiquette absent from the captains’ more taxonomic writing.
What the Day Reveals
Read together, these entries map the expedition’s documentary specialization. The captains, with leisure imposed by the snowbound delay, turn to the cabinet-of-curiosities work — Lewis composing primary descriptions of the horned lizard (Phrynosoma) and Clark’s later-identified Clark’s nutcracker (“birds of the Corvus genus… a loud squaling note something like the newing of a Cat”). Gass keeps the practical log. Ordway, even when his entry properly belongs to another day, attends to commerce, etiquette, and the texture of Nez Perce hospitality. No single narrator is sufficient: the choke cherry blooms only in Lewis, the Spanish dollar circulates only in Ordway, the river crests only in Gass, and Clark — copying, condensing, sometimes adding (his Corvus passage is his own) — produces the hybrid record that has shaped most subsequent narratives of the expedition’s long Idaho wait.
