The journals of May 24, 1806 offer an unusually rich opportunity to compare narrators, because all four diarists present at Camp Chopunnish — Lewis, Clark, Gass, and Ordway — record the same day with strikingly different priorities. The day’s central event is the apparent recovery of William Bratton, paralyzed in the lower back for weeks, after a violent sweat-bath improvised by John Shields. Around that event swirl a sick Shoshone infant, a paralyzed Nez Perce chief seeking treatment, and the ordinary rhythms of a hunting camp.
Parallel Captains, Diverging Detail
Lewis and Clark clearly composed their entries in close consultation, or one copied substantially from the other. The opening sentences are nearly identical in substance: both note that the child (Sacagawea’s son, Jean Baptiste) was “very wrestless last night” with swelling on the jaw and neck, and both record administering cream of tartar and a fresh onion poultice. Both then pivot to Bratton’s case in the same order, attributing the suggestion to Shields and describing the sweat-hole construction step by step.
Yet the differences are revealing. Clark’s account is more compressed and practical; Lewis’s is fuller, more clinical, and includes details Clark omits entirely. Lewis alone records that Bratton drank “copious draughts of a strong tea of horse mint” during the sweat, and that Shields had previously seen “Sinnecca snake root” used for the same purpose. Lewis also notes that the patient was “striped naked” and plunged in cold water “twise” — Clark says only “a few minits” in cold water. Where Clark writes that Bratton was kept in the hole “about 1 hour,” Lewis specifies “three quarters of an hour” after the cold plunge. The captains’ shared observations confirm the event; their divergences suggest each was writing up notes independently after a common conversation.
On the visiting Nez Perce chief, Lewis writes at greater length, attempting a differential diagnosis — ruling out rheumatism and “parelitic attack” — while Clark records only the practical response:
We are at a loss to deturmine what to do for this unfortunate man. I gave him a few drops of Lodman and Some portable Supe as medisine.
Clark, characteristically, names the medicines dispensed; Lewis, characteristically, theorizes about etiology.
The Enlisted Men’s Brevity
Patrick Gass and John Ordway, writing in the enlisted register, compress the entire day into a few lines apiece — and yet each preserves something the captains do not foreground. Gass alone connects Bratton’s sweat to a previous Indigenous treatment, writing:
One of the men that were sick, still keeps unwell, with a bad pain in his back; and is in a helpless state. Yesterday we gave him an Indian sweat and he is some better to day.
Gass calls the procedure an “Indian sweat” — a label neither captain uses, though both attribute the technique’s efficacy to Shields’s prior observation of similar cures. Gass’s phrasing implicitly credits Native medical practice as the model, a framing the captains’ more elaborate descriptions partly obscure beneath Shields’s name.
Ordway, meanwhile, ignores Bratton entirely and instead records the social texture of the day:
eral of the natives came down the river in a canoe. Several of the party went across the river to the village and Several Indians came across to our Camp.
Where the captains fix on medicine and Gass on the sick, Ordway documents the steady traffic between camp and the Nez Perce villages — the kind of routine intercourse that the captains, focused on Bratton and the chief, mention only glancingly when Clark notes that “4 of our men Crossed the river and went to the broken arms Village and returned in the evening with a Supply of bread and roots.”
Register, Authorship, and What Survives
The day’s records illustrate how the expedition’s documentary record was layered. The captains’ parallel entries — overlapping in phrasing but each preserving unique medical details — suggest a shared draft or close consultation, with Lewis adding the more technical and ethnobotanical observations. Gass’s terse summary preserves a cultural attribution (“Indian sweat”) absent from the officers’ versions. Ordway’s fragment, focused on inter-village movement, reminds the reader that Camp Chopunnish was not only a hospital but a node in an active Nez Perce social network. Read together, the four narrators on May 24 demonstrate that no single journal — even the captains’ — captures the full day; the cross-narrator record is irreducibly plural.
