The entries for May 12, 1806 record a day of intense diplomacy and medical practice in the Nez Perce camps near the Clearwater. All four narrators present — Lewis, Clark, Ordway, and Gass — describe gifts of horses and a feast, but the depth and angle of attention varies dramatically across the four registers, from Gass’s terse two-sentence summary to Lewis’s extended ethnographic set-piece.
Four Registers of a Single Council
Gass compresses the day into a brief inventory: four horses given, one killed for food, bread of Co-was and sweet roots called Com-mas, and three more recovered horses. His sergeant’s-eye-view records subsistence and property, nothing more. Ordway, also a sergeant, is similarly transactional but adds the ceremonial gesture absent from Gass:
three brave men of this tribe painted up three of their horses the best they had & were excelent horses they made a present of them to our officers, our officers then gave them some ammunition and they locked hands with our officers as a Sincere token of friendship
Ordway’s “locked hands” is a detail neither captain reports — a rare instance where an enlisted man’s prose preserves embodied diplomacy that the officers’ more formal narrative omits.
Clark and Lewis, predictably, share the day’s structural backbone: a morning of administering eyewater to roughly forty patients, a council among the Nez Perce, the presentation of horses by two young men at the nation’s instance, and the distribution of flags, powder, and balls. The two captains’ accounts of the gift exchange are nearly verbatim in places, suggesting consultation or shared drafting — both report “we caused the cheifs to be Seated” and identical quantities of powder and ball. Clark, however, adds a personal exchange Lewis omits: Broken Arm, or Tun na the mootoolt, “pulled off his leather Shirt and gave me. I in return gave him a Shirt.”
Lewis Alone Witnesses the Mush Ceremony
The most striking divergence is Lewis’s extended description of the ratification ritual, which appears in no other journal. After the chiefs deliberated, Lewis writes, Broken Arm
took the flour of the roots of cows and thickened the scope in the kettles and baskets of all his people, this being ended he made a harangue the purport of which was making known the deliberations of their council and impressing the necessity of unanimity among them
The chief then invited all who would abide by the council’s decrees to eat, and required dissenters to abstain. Lewis — relying, he admits, on “one of our men who was present” — reports that
there was not a dissenting voice on this great national question, but all swallowed their objections if any they had, very cheerfully with their mush.
The wry phrasing is characteristically Lewis. He alone also notes the women’s ritual response: “the women cryed wrung their hands, toar their hair and appeared to be in the utmost distress.” That Clark, Ordway, and Gass all miss this ceremony is significant. Clark was occupied with patients — by his own account “closely employed until 12 P.M.” — which explains his silence. Gass and Ordway, camped at some remove from the lodge, evidently never learned of it. The mush ritual survives only because Lewis interviewed an unnamed enlisted observer.
Medicine, Horses, and What Each Narrator Counts
Clark’s entry is the day’s most detailed medical record. Where Lewis writes of “a croud of at least 50 applicants,” Clark itemizes complaints: sore eyes, “Rhumatic disorders & weaknesses in the back and loins perticularly the womin,” a chief’s disability, a man with a swelled hip. Clark also offers the day’s only ethnographic comment on Nez Perce horsemanship, observing that sore backs are “Caused by rideing them either with out Saddles, or with pads which does not prevent the wate of the rider pressing imedeately on the back bone.”
Each narrator’s silences are as revealing as his observations. Gass tracks food and livestock; Ordway notices a handshake; Clark catalogues bodies and horseflesh; Lewis reaches for the political and ceremonial frame. Read together, the four entries reconstruct a day that no single journal captures whole — a Nez Perce nation binding itself to peace by communal feast, while two captains parceled out powder, balls, and eyewater in roughly equal measure.
