The entries of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and John Ordway for May 8, 1806, document the same morning of hunting and the same afternoon march toward the Twisted Hair’s lodge, but the three accounts diverge sharply in emphasis. Lewis the naturalist catalogues a duck and reconstructs Nez Perce subsistence ecology; Clark the surveyor measures a fish trap and records geographic intelligence from a Native informant; Ordway the sergeant tracks the social temperature of the chiefs and the practical fate of the expedition’s horses.
Three Versions of a Shared Morning
All three men open with the hunters. Ordway reports plainly that “Several of the hunters went out and killed 4 Deer,” noting that Lewis’s dog Scannon ran down a wounded animal. Clark gives the same tally — “Total of our Stock of provisions 4 deer & Some horse flesh” — and credits the dog as “our Dog.” Lewis, by contrast, opens with a disciplinary note absent from the other journals:
a few others remained without our permission or knoledge untill late in the morning, we chid them severely for their indolence and inattention to the order of last evening.
The captain’s possessive — “my dog caught” — quietly distinguishes Lewis’s record from Clark’s collaborative “our Dog” and Ordway’s deferential “Capt Lewises dog Scamon.” Such small pronoun shifts run throughout the day’s writing and mark the differing vantage points of commander, co-commander, and enlisted diarist.
Lewis alone pauses over a duck Shields shot, devoting roughly a third of his entry to a description of beak, plumage, and iris — “puple black and iris of an orrange colour” — that has no counterpart in the other journals. The specimen interests him as a naturalist; for Clark and Ordway it is not worth mention.
Reading a Landscape of Hunger
Both captains independently register the evidence of Nez Perce winter starvation, but their framings differ. Clark writes that the natives “have been much distressed for provisions” and “were Compelled to Collect the moss off the pine boil & eate it in the latter part of the last Winter.” Lewis offers the fuller ethnobotanical account:
they were compelled to collect the moss which grows on the pine which they boiled and eat… the seed of this speceis of pine is about the size and much the shape of the seed of the large sunflower; they are nutricious and not unpleasent when roasted or boiled, during this month the natives also peal this pine and eat the succulent or inner bark.
Lewis’s phrase “not unpleasent when roasted or boiled” suggests he tasted the seeds himself; Clark’s parallel passage is briefer and more reportorial. Ordway omits the starvation observations entirely. The fish trap follows the same pattern. Clark gives the most detailed engineering account — a stone dam channeling water through a four-by-six-foot horizontal mat of willow switches — and notes he personally “cought or took off those willows 9 Small trout from 3 to 7 Inches in length.” Lewis credits the discovery to his colleague (“Capt. C. took several small trout from this trap”) and compares the device to “falling trap[s]… frequent seen in the atlantic states.” Ordway records neither the trap nor the trout.
Diplomacy and the Missing Horses
Where the captains’ entries grow expansive on natural history, Ordway concentrates on the political fact that brought the party to this camp: the horses left with Twisted Hair the previous autumn. Ordway is the only narrator who openly characterizes the meeting as awkward:
we met the twisted hair the chief of the Chopennish tribe who we left our horses with, he did not appear Sociable as when we left him… the chiefs kept themselves at a distance for a while then by an invitation came and Smoaked.
He alone explains the cause — that Twisted Hair and Cut Nose “is not at a good understanding with each other respecting our horses, caused by jealousy” — and supplies the practical bottom line that “most of our horses and pack Saddles were Safe, but Some of boath had been [made] use of by the admittance of the head chief.” Clark notes only that “The Great Chief of the Bands below who has a cut nose joined us this morning,” and Lewis names him “Neesh-ne-park-kee-ook” without explaining the rivalry. The Snake Indian interpreter’s pique — refusing to speak through Sacagawea because he was not given enough venison — appears in Clark’s journal in vivid detail but is reduced in Ordway’s to a functional note about getting information “about the country rivers &C.”
Taken together, the three entries show a characteristic division of labor in the expedition’s record-keeping: Lewis the cataloguer of species and customs, Clark the measurer of structures and recorder of Native cartography (he received a sketch of “the 1st large Southerly fork of Lewis’s river”), and Ordway the chronicler of camp politics and the expedition’s logistical anxieties. None of the three accounts is sufficient on its own; read against one another, they reconstruct a fuller May 8 than any single journal preserves.
