Stalled below the snowpack of the Bitterroot crossing, the Corps spent June 11, 1806, encamped on a camas flat that all four journal-keepers describe in markedly different registers. Patrick Gass, John Ordway, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark each record the same skeleton of events — hunters dispatched at daylight, two successful kills, the Nez Perce visitors taking their leave, Whitehouse sent back for a stray horse — yet what each chooses to elaborate reveals the divergent purposes their notebooks served.
One Day, Four Registers
Gass, the carpenter-sergeant whose journal was prepared with a popular readership in mind, gives the day a pastoral tone. He notes that the hunters “returned at noon, having killed a bear and two deer,” then turns to the landscape itself:
In this plain there are the most strawberry vines I ever saw, and now all in blossom. This plain contains about two thousand acres, and is surrounded with beautiful pine timber of different kinds.
Where Gass sees a scene, Ordway counts inventory. His entry names the hunters individually — “Gibson had killed one fine large buck & Labuche killed a black bear and a large buck & a crain” — and tracks the Indian hunting party’s movement “across this commass flat on horse back to another prarie or flat to the North.” Ordway alone records the crane and the wounded deer and pheasants that the captains omit, and he alone observes that “our horses have excelent feed in this pleasant commass flat” — the practical concern of a sergeant responsible for stock.
Lewis and Clark, by contrast, dispatch the day’s events in nearly identical opening paragraphs. Lewis writes that “Labuish and Gibson only proved successfull,” while Clark, in his characteristic phonetic spellings, renders the same sentence as “Labeech and Shann was the only Suckcessull hunters.” Clark’s “Shann” for Gibson is a slip; the substance is Lewis’s. The parallel wording — down to the exchange of “an indifferent horse” for “a verey good one” and the order to hunters to “lay out all night” — confirms what scholars have long established for the return journey: Clark was copying Lewis, often within hours of the original composition.
The Quamash Treatise
What sets the captains’ entries apart from the sergeants’ is the long botanical essay that follows the day’s narrative. Lewis, the expedition’s designated naturalist, devotes the bulk of his entry to Camassia quamash, the bulb that the Chopunnish (Nez Perce) relied on as a staple. He fixes its habitat with a field botanist’s precision:
it delights in a black rich moist soil, and even grows most luxuriantly where the land remains from 6 to nine inches under water untill the seed are nearly perfect which in this neighbourhood or on these flats is about the last of this month.
He proceeds through the radix (“a tunicated bulb, much the consistence shape and appearance of the onion”), the radicles, and the foliage, comparing the bulb’s size to “a nutmeg” or “a hens egg.” Clark’s parallel passage tracks Lewis almost word for word, with the orthographic divergences that always distinguish the two: Lewis’s “tunicated” becomes Clark’s “tumicated,” “flexable” becomes “flexeable,” “linear” becomes “liner.” Clark even retains Lewis’s phrasing “it seems devoted to it’s particular soil and situation” verbatim. The copying is mechanical enough that Clark reproduces a phrase Lewis canceled mid-thought (“in short almost as much so as the bulbs will permit”) without smoothing it.
What Each Narrator Sees
The cross-narrator pattern on this date is instructive. Gass, writing for publication, foregrounds aesthetic detail — strawberry blossoms, the timbered surround, the soil quality — and notes the sociable fact that “The natives all left us and we remained in quietness by ourselves,” a register absent from the other three journals. Ordway, ever the recorder of small particulars, captures the crane, the unsuccessful Indian hunt, and the condition of the horses. Lewis composes a scientific monograph on a food plant his men had been eating for weeks but had never before been described to Western readers. Clark, faithful amanuensis, copies it.
The convergence on the day’s hunting roster — Labiche’s bear, Gibson’s buck, the horse trade, Whitehouse’s errand — shows that all four men attended to the same operational facts. The divergence afterward shows what each man thought a journal was for: a publishable narrative (Gass), a quartermaster’s log (Ordway), a contribution to natural history (Lewis), or an insurance copy of the commander’s record (Clark).
