The journal entries for May 5, 1806, offer an unusually rich case for cross-narrator comparison. Lewis, Clark, and Sergeant Ordway all describe the same march of roughly twenty miles up the Kooskooske (Clearwater) River, the same lodges, the same scarcity of provisions, and the same encampment near Colter’s Creek. Yet the three accounts diverge sharply in what each writer chooses to elevate, conceal, or claim.
Parallel Texts and the Question of Copying
The Lewis and Clark entries for this date are nearly identical at the sentence level — a pattern familiar to readers of the captains’ journals, in which one officer transcribes from the other’s draft. Lewis opens:
Collected our horses and set out at 7 A.M. at 4 1/2 miles we arrived at the entrance of the Kooskooske, up the N. Eastern side of which we continued our march 12 ms. to a large lodge of 10 families
Clark’s opening is verbatim save for capitalization and the spelling “arived.” The shared phrasing continues through the description of the gray mare, the dinner of two dogs, and the puppy incident. Where the texts diverge is telling. Lewis writes that an Indian “gave Capt. C. a very eligant grey mare,” preserving the third-person frame. Clark, recording the same gift, shifts to first person: “he brought foward a very eligant Gray mare and gave her to me.” Clark also expands the medical backstory, adding a second cure that Lewis omits — a man near the Kooskooske’s mouth with “a tumure on his thye,” treated the previous autumn with “a jentle pirge” and Castile soap. This addition suggests Clark either drafted the medical passage independently or amplified Lewis’s draft with his own recollections, since he is the physician in question.
Both captains then deploy the identical, striking justification:
in our present situation I think it pardonable to continue this deseption for they will not give us any provision without compensation in merchandize and our stock is now reduced to a mere handfull.
The shared sentence is one of the more candid admissions of expedient ethics in the journals, and its appearance in both notebooks indicates a deliberately preserved formulation rather than spontaneous parallel composition.
The Puppy Incident: Lewis’s First Person, Clark’s Third
The day’s most vivid scene — an unnamed Chopunnish man tossing a starved puppy at Lewis in mockery of the corps’ dog-eating — receives nearly identical narration in both captains’ books, but with a crucial pronoun shift. Lewis writes in the first person:
I was so provoked at his insolence that I caught the puppy and thew it with great violence at him and struk him in the breast and face, siezed my tomahawk and shewed him by signs if he repeated his insolence I would tommahawk him
Clark, recording the same episode, externalizes it: “Capt L. was So provoked at the insolence that he cought the puppy and threw it with great violence at him.” The grammatical evidence here strongly suggests Clark is copying from Lewis’s draft and converting first-person verbs to third — a routine practice when one captain wrote up a day the other had also witnessed.
Notably, Ordway records nothing of the puppy at all. His silence is consistent with sergeant-level journal practice: incidents involving the captains’ personal dignity rarely enter the enlisted men’s records, whether by discretion or because Ordway simply was not present at that particular dinner.
Ordway’s Different Eye
Where the captains converge, Ordway diverges productively. He alone counts the lodges as “all in one joining for about 100 yards long,” a detail of communal architecture that Lewis renders only as a building “156 feet long and about 15 wide built of mats and straw.” Ordway notices the women’s labor — “pounding” roots and forming them “in cakes” to dry as mountain provision — a domestic observation absent from both captains. He also records the diplomatic content of the evening more explicitly than Lewis or Clark: the chiefs were told “by intreptation of thro 6 tongues what our business was and that our tradors would come about the head of the missourie.” The six-language relay (English to French to Hidatsa to Shoshone to a Snake prisoner to Nez Perce, by the standard reconstruction) is a logistical fact the captains glide past on this date but that Ordway, perhaps more impressed by the spectacle of translation, sets down plainly.
Ordway also records something the captains do not: a promise that “the natives promised to reward us by giving us a good horse tommorrow for us to eat as they wished us to Stay two or 3 days with them.” This anticipatory note — pointing forward to the corps’ extended delay among the Nez Perce while waiting for snow to melt in the Bitterroots — appears in the sergeant’s journal before either captain mentions it, a reminder that the rank-and-file diarists sometimes registered the immediate transactional reality of the camps more readily than the officers did.
