The expedition’s struggle to acquire horses from the Eneeshur and Skilloot peoples on April 20, 1806, produced one of the most revealing multi-narrator clusters of the return journey. Patrick Gass, John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis all describe the same frustrations — restless stud horses, pilfered tomahawks, a horse lost at a gambling circle — but each writes in a register that exposes his rank, his interests, and the limits of his information.
The Tomahawk Theft and the Gambled Horse
Gass, the carpenter-sergeant, compresses the day into four terse sentences. He notes the white frost, the broken ropes, and concludes flatly:
With all our care they stole 4 or 5 tomahawks.
Lewis, writing as commanding officer, gives the same incident administrative weight, raising the count and adding a knife:
This morning I was informed that the natives had pilfered six tommahawks and a knife from the party in the course of the last night. I spoke to the cheif on this subject. he appeared angry with his people and addressed them but the property was not restored.
Where Gass simply tallies losses, Lewis records the diplomatic protocol — appeal to the chief, the chief’s public anger, the failure of recovery. Ordway, by contrast, omits the tomahawks entirely but supplies the most vivid account of the gambling episode that cost the expedition a horse. He describes the hand-game in ethnographic detail:
the game that these Savages play is by setting in a circle & have a Small Smooth bone in their hands & Sing crossing their hands to fix it in a hidden manner from the other Side who gass [guess] the hand that has it in then counts one a Stick Stuck in the ground for tallies & So on untill one Side or the other wins the propertey Stacked up.
Ordway’s curiosity — “this game is played with activity, and they appear merry & peaceable” — produces an observation Lewis condenses to a single dismissive clause: the horse “had been gambled away by the rascal who had sold it to me.” Lewis records the legal remedy (“I therefore took the goods back from this fellow”); Ordway records the cultural context. Gass mentions neither.
Two Captains, Two Villages, Two Tones
Lewis and Clark were separated on April 20, Clark detained at a village below the falls trying to trade for horses while Lewis remained with the main party above. The split produces an unusual opportunity to compare their independent prose on parallel subjects, and the contrast is striking.
Clark, cold and unsuccessful, writes with raw exasperation:
I am half frozed at this inhospitable Village… I used every artifice decent & even false Statements to enduce those pore devils to Sell me horses.
His confession of “false Statements” is unusually candid. He closes the day lying down in the back of a lodge with Sergeant Pryor, “with our arms in a Situation as to be ready in case” — the entry breaking off mid-sentence, the threat unspoken.
Lewis, working from the same cultural encounter but with the security of numbers, produces a more polished ethnographic catalogue: the three villages enumerated (19, 11, and 5 lodges), the trade in silk grass and bear grass, the porcupine-quilled shirts “of the same form with those of the Shoshone Chopunnish.” Yet his judgment is harsher than Clark’s:
they are poor, dirty, proud, haughty, inhospitable, parsimonious and faithless in every rispect, nothing but our numbers I beleive prevents their attempting to murder us at this moment.
Clark’s parallel verdict — “Pore and Kind durty & indolt” — is notably milder, retaining the word “Kind” alongside the complaints. The two captains, writing the same ethnographic summary on the same day, diverge on whether their hosts are hospitable or homicidal.
Patterns of Borrowing and Independent Detail
The three villages of 19, 11, and 5 lodges appear in both Lewis and Clark, suggesting shared field notes or evening conversation across the separated camps — though Clark gives only the village of 19 in detail, while Lewis enumerates all three. Both captains describe the same trade goods (silk grass, bear grass, pounded fish for beads and skins), but Clark’s list is more concrete and transactional, Lewis’s more taxonomic.
Ordway alone records the practical disposal of the canoes — “we split & burnt one of them this evening” — a detail Lewis confirms in passing (“one of the canoes for which they would give us but little I had cut up for fuel”) but which Gass and Clark omit. Gass alone emphasizes that “they are all studs,” the single mechanical detail that explains why the rope-breaking was so persistent.
Across the four entries, a coherent picture emerges only by triangulation: Gass supplies the equine cause, Ordway the cultural texture, Clark the emotional cost of bargaining, and Lewis the administrative summary. No single journal carries the day.
