The journals of May 10, 1806 capture a single day of striking contrasts: a snowbound morning on the high plain, a steep descent into a snowless creek bottom, and a reception by the Nez Perce chief Tunnachemootoolt that the captains would single out as the most generous they had encountered west of the Rockies. Patrick Gass, John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis each recorded the day, and the four entries together reveal how differently enlisted men and officers framed the same events.
Measuring the Snow, Measuring the Distance
The four narrators cannot quite agree on the depth of snow or the length of the march. Gass reports the snow on the plain as “about five inches deep,” while Ordway records that “the Snow fell 6 Inches deep.” Clark and Lewis, writing in close parallel, both give “8 inches deep on the plain.” The discrepancy is characteristic: the sergeants measured what lay around their own bedding, while the captains seem to have agreed on a shared figure for the official record.
Distance shows the same pattern. Gass estimates the day’s travel at “about 12 miles”; Ordway, riding the same route, writes that they “wrode about 20 miles”; Lewis fixes the march precisely at “course S. 35 E. and distance 16 ms.” Lewis’s compass bearing and exact mileage betray the officer’s surveying habit, while the enlisted men offer rougher impressions shaped by fatigue and hunger.
The Descent into Commearp Creek
All four writers register astonishment at the sudden disappearance of snow as they dropped down to the creek. Gass captures the transition with plain wonder:
When we were about half way down the hill there was not a particle of snow nor the least appearance of it.
Clark, more analytically, works out the meteorology:
It seams that the Snow melted in falling and decended here in rain while it snowed in the plain. the hills are about Eight hundred feet high about 1/4 of which distance the Snow had decended and Still lay on the Sides of the hill.
Ordway notices the vegetation that the snow line revealed — “considerable of cottonwood and wild or choke cherry along this creek & Scattering pine on the edges of the hills” — an ecological eye that Lewis, surprisingly, does not exercise here. Ordway also offers the day’s most practical conclusion: “we are now as near the Mountains as we can git untill Such times as the Snow is nearly gone of[f] the mountains as we are too eairly to cross.”
Hospitality and Its Recording
The day’s central event is the welcome at Tunnachemootoolt’s village. Here Clark and Lewis write in such close parallel that one was clearly drafted from the other or from a shared field note. Compare Clark’s
this flag was hoisted on a pole unde the flag the Chief met me and Conducted me to a Spot near a Small run about 80 paces from his Lodges where he requested me to halt
with Lewis’s
this flag was now displayed on a staff placed at no great distance from the lodge. underneath the flag the Cheif met my friend Capt. C. who was in front and conducted him about 80 yds. to a place on the bank of the creek where he requested we should encamp
The 80-pace measurement, the flag, the conducting of Clark — these are shared facts. But Lewis alone elevates the moment into ceremonial prose, declaring that the Nez Perce gift of two horses was
a much greater act of hospitality than we have witnessed from any nation or tribe since we have passed the Rocky mountains. in short be it spoken to their immortal honor it is the only act which deserves the appellation of hospitallity which we have witnessed in this quarter.
Clark records the same generosity but registers it through policy rather than panegyric, noting that he “directed the men not to croud their Lodge in serch of food” out of respect for the chief’s liberality.
The enlisted journalists frame the gift quite differently. Gass writes matter-of-factly that the Nez Perce “divided their stock with us; and told us what they had given was all they could spare.” Ordway adds an ethnographic detail the captains omit entirely: “in the evening we played the fiddle and danced a while a number of Indians came from other villages to See us.” The fiddle, a recurring instrument of diplomacy in Ordway’s journal, vanishes from the official record.
Patterns of Attention
The day’s entries demonstrate a consistent division of labor among the journalists. Lewis supplies bearings, named chiefs (Tunnachemootoolt, Hohastillpilp), and the rhetorical framing for posterity. Clark mirrors Lewis on diplomatic substance but adds geological reasoning and concern for crew discipline. Gass compresses the day into narrative essentials and the soldier’s preoccupation with food. Ordway, often the most ethnographically curious of the four, preserves the music, the leather lodge raised by Nez Perce women, and the reasoning about when the mountains might be passable. Read together, the four entries recover a fuller May 10 than any one journal alone preserves.
