The journal entries for May 17, 1806, offer a rare opportunity to compare four narrators describing an essentially uneventful day at Camp Chopunnish. Heavy rain had soaked the encampment, the Bitterroot snowpack remained impassable, and the captains were attempting to organize a sustainable hunting rotation. Yet the four accounts diverge sharply in register, detail, and emotional weight — and the close textual parallels between Lewis and Clark on this date offer especially clear evidence of their shared compositional practice.
Parallel Texts: Lewis and Clark in Lockstep
The Lewis and Clark entries for this date track one another almost phrase by phrase. Both record Sergeant Pryor’s return at 9 A.M. with a black bear; both note Collins’s runaway horse; both decline to send for the abandoned carcass; both describe the apportioning of horses to hunters; both remark on the absence of Indian visitors as a singular event; and both close with nearly identical reflections on the snowbound mountains.
Clark writes:
that icy barier which Seperates me from my friends and Country, from all which makes life estimable, is yet white with the Snow which is maney feet deep.
Lewis’s version is unmistakably the source — or the twin:
that icy barier which seperates me from my friends and Country, from all which makes life esteemable.patience, patience
Clark continues with practical observations about consulting the natives on a mid-June crossing date. Lewis, by contrast, breaks off into the wrenching repetition “patience, patience” — a private exhalation Clark does not reproduce. The shared sentence demonstrates that one captain copied from the other (most often Clark from Lewis on natural-history matters), but Clark consistently softens or omits Lewis’s most personal flourishes, while Lewis allows himself the literary gesture.
The Chronometer: A Study in Detail
The wetting of Lewis’s chronometer is recorded by both captains, but the contrast in detail is revealing. Clark notes simply that the rain
unfortunately wet the Crenomuter in the fob of Capt. L. breaches. which has never before been wet Since we Set out on this expedition. her works were cautiously wiped and made dry by Capt. L.
Lewis, the instrument’s owner, expands the episode into a small drama. He marvels that every part of his breeches escaped moisture “except the fob where the time peice was,” describes draining the water, drying the works “with dry feathers,” and treating the rusted iron with “a little bears oil.” The chronometer was the expedition’s most sensitive scientific instrument, essential for longitude calculations, and Lewis’s anxious procedural detail reflects a proprietor’s concern that Clark, summarizing, does not share. Neither Gass nor Ordway mentions the incident at all.
Gass and Ordway: The Enlisted Register
Patrick Gass and John Ordway, writing in the enlisted men’s register, compress the day to its operational essentials. Ordway records the bear hunt and the order that
our officers directed that 10 or 12 hunters turn out a hunting tommorrow. asigned them horses Some three & others 4 to hunt on in turn.
This is the same arrangement Lewis describes at length, but Ordway gives the practical numbers — ten or twelve men, three or four horses each — that the captains’ more discursive prose obscures. Ordway also identifies one of the bears as “white,” matching Clark’s identification, where Lewis prefers the more precise “variegated bear.”
Gass’s published entry is the briefest of the four:
light rain all day. Our other two hunters came in and had killed two large bears. They said it snowed on the hills, when it rained at our camp in the valley.
Gass uniquely captures the elevational contrast as the hunters themselves reported it — rain in the valley, snow on the hills — a vernacular detail the captains render in more abstract meteorological terms. Gass’s published volume on this date also carries an editorial digression on Indian stone war-club heads, an interpolation by his publisher rather than Gass’s own field observation; readers should treat such passages with caution as evidence of what Gass actually wrote at Camp Chopunnish.
One Day, Four Registers
The May 17 entries illustrate the stratified documentary economy of the expedition. Lewis writes as a literary diarist and scientific observer, indulging in personal lament. Clark, working from Lewis’s draft or alongside him, preserves the substance and even the phrasing while curbing the emotional excess. Ordway documents logistics with a sergeant’s precision. Gass, filtered through later editorial hands, preserves the soldier’s-eye vernacular. Read together, they reconstruct a single rainy Saturday more fully than any one of them could alone.
