The second of May 1805 produced one of the more vivid meteorological paradoxes the Corps of Discovery would record on the upper Missouri: cottonwood leaves “as large as a dollar,” prairie flowers in bloom, and an inch of fresh snow on the sand beaches. All four extant journalists for the day—Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Sergeant John Ordway, and Private Joseph Whitehouse—describe the storm, the delayed departure, the successful hunt, and the discovery of red cloth at an abandoned Indian camp. Read side by side, the four entries form a small case study in how observation, ethnography, and language passed between officers and enlisted men in the expedition’s daily record-keeping.
Lewis as Ethnographic Source
Lewis devotes the bulk of his entry to the scarlet cloth that Joseph Field discovered “suspended on the bough of a tree near an old indian hunting camp.” His treatment is expansive and interpretive, attributing the offering “probably of the Assinniboin nation” and generalizing to “all the nations inhabiting the waters of the Missouri so far as they are known to us.” He theorizes about the psychology of the practice:
very honestly making their own feelings the test of those of the deity offer him the article which they most prize themselves.
Lewis catalogues the occasions for sacrifice—”relief from hungar or mallady, protection from their enemies”—and adds a separate paragraph defining the term that would echo through the other three journals:
every thing which is incomprehensible to the indians they call big medicine, and is the opperation of the presnts and power of the great sperit.
Clark, by contrast, omits the cloth and the ethnography entirely. His entry is meteorological and practical: the thermometer at 28 above zero, the “verry extroadernaley Climate,” the ice freezing to the oars, the beaver he and Drouillard shot along the bank. Clark’s silence on the sacrifice is notable because he was present; the topic simply did not interest him in the way it interested Lewis.
Ordway and Whitehouse: A Shared Source
The most striking textual feature of the day is the near-identity of the Ordway and Whitehouse entries. Compare Whitehouse’s account of the cloth—
where we expect they left last winter for a Sacrifice to their maker as that is their form of worship, as they have Some knowledge of the Supreme being, and anything above their comprihention they call big medicine.
—with Ordway’s:
that attested they left them as a Sacrifice as that is their form of worship, as they have Some knowledge of the Supreme being, and any thing above their comprehention they Call Big Medisine
The phrasing is so close that direct copying, or a shared oral briefing from one of the captains, is the only plausible explanation. Both men report the snow depth in identical terms (“about 12 Inches Deep” on the sand beaches versus an inch on the level), both record “3 beaver” shot by Clark and a hunter, both give the day’s distance as five miles, and both close on a “handsom bottom” on the north side. Ordway, as sergeant, kept the more authoritative enlisted-man’s journal; Whitehouse appears to have leaned on Ordway’s text or notes when writing up his own.
Yet neither sergeant nor private grasps Lewis’s ethnographic vocabulary with full confidence. Where Lewis carefully distinguishes the sacrifice from the linguistic concept of “big medicine,” Ordway and Whitehouse fuse the two, treating “big medicine” as if it were a synonym for the act of sacrifice itself. The diffusion of Lewis’s ideas down the chain of command is partial—the words travel, the conceptual structure does not.
What Each Narrator Sees
Lewis alone describes the beaver tail as a culinary delicacy resembling “the fresh tongues and sounds of the codfish.” Lewis alone reports that one of the men shot the Indian dog “that had followed us for several days” because it stole cooked provisions—a detail editor Reuben Gold Thwaites attributes in a footnote to Clark, but which appears in the Lewis manuscript here. Clark alone records the thermometer reading. Ordway and Whitehouse alone specify that the snow was driven against the banks where the wind “blew it up” against the sand beaches.
The day thus illustrates a recurring pattern in the expedition’s record: Lewis supplies natural-historical and ethnographic depth; Clark supplies instrument readings and navigational fact; the sergeants and privates harmonize fragments of both, sometimes copying one another in the process. No single journal would convey the full texture of May 2, 1805—the green leaves and the inch of snow, the scarlet cloth on the bough, the dog shot at dawn, and the ice forming on the oars at dusk.
