The entries for May 4, 1806 offer an unusually clear view into how the expedition’s journal-keepers worked. Lewis and Clark produce nearly identical paragraphs; Ordway and Gass write independently in plainer registers. Together the four accounts describe a single difficult day: cold morning, a fertile plain crossed at speed, a lean breakfast of dogs and root-bread at a poor lodge on Lewis’s River, the recovery of news about stolen horses, and a ferry crossing made on Nez Perce advice.
Twin Captains, Diverging Details
Lewis and Clark’s entries are textually parallel almost sentence by sentence, sharing courses (“N. 60° E. 4 miles”), the same observation that the ammunition canisters kept the load dry when a packhorse slipped, and the same botanical inventory of longleafed pine and balsam fir. Yet small divergences betray independent transcription. Clark identifies the chief encountered after dinner as
Te-toh-ar-sky the oldest of the two Chiefs who accompanied us last fall to the Great falls of the Columbia
while Lewis writes that Te-toh-ar-sky was
the youngest of the two cheifs who accompanied us last fall the great falls of the Columbia
The contradiction — oldest versus youngest — is the kind of factual slip that emerges when one captain copies from the other’s notes and miscopies a single word. Lewis additionally mentions “some Larch” among the timber that Clark omits, and Clark uniquely records meeting “our old pilot,” a phrasing Lewis softens to “our pilot.”
Where the captains agree on geography and natural history, they share a single observational voice. The fertility of the loam, the snow line on the southwestern mountains, the distribution of the Chopunnish into small villages gathering quawmash and cows root — these pass between the two journals nearly verbatim.
Ordway and Gass: The Enlisted View
The sergeants write in a register stripped of latitude bearings and soil chemistry. Ordway’s entry compresses the day into transactions:
we bought a little dark couloured root bread which is not good but will Support nature, bought 2 dogs & a fiew Small fresh fish
Where Lewis describes the bread botanically as “made of a root which resembles the sweet potatoe,” Ordway evaluates it as food a hungry man must swallow. Gass strikes a similar note, observing that the single dog purchased
was a scanty allowance for thirty odd hungry men
a calculation absent from both captains’ journals, which never tally mouths against meat.
Gass also preserves a structural detail the captains pass over. His entry for the following morning describes the lodge where the party encamped:
This lodge is built much after the form of the Virginia fodder houses; is about fifty yards long, and contains twenty families.
The Virginia simile is characteristic of Gass, whose published journal frequently reaches for comparisons drawn from settler architecture. Neither Lewis nor Clark records the lodge’s dimensions or its twenty families.
The Stolen Horses
All four narrators register the same piece of intelligence — that the Shoshone guide “Toby,” who left the expedition the previous fall, took two horses with him — but they distribute it differently. Ordway places it as direct reported speech from a Chopunnish chief:
he tells us that tobe our Snake Indn guide took 2 of our best horses away with him when he left us
Gass folds the same news into his May 5 entry, attributing it to the chief who is now traveling with the party. Lewis and Clark, characteristically, defer the matter; their May 4 entries describe meeting Te-toh-ar-sky and the old pilot but route the horse business through subsequent days. Ordway’s immediacy here — naming Toby, calling the lost animals “our best horses” — preserves a piece of camp talk that the captains’ more measured prose loses.
The day’s crossing of Lewis’s River, undertaken on Nez Perce counsel that the north-east side offered “a better rout to the forks,” appears in all four journals. Gass alone notes the logistical strain:
we could raise but four small canoes from the natives at this place
and that the operation consumed “the remainder of the day.” Read together, the four entries reconstruct a Sunday in which the Corps was hungry, dependent on Nez Perce hospitality and navigational advice, and beginning to gather the horses and information needed for the long ascent of the Kooskooske.
