The reunion at the Twisted Hair’s lodge on May 9, 1806, was a logistical milestone for the returning expedition: twenty-one horses recovered, packsaddles retrieved, and a cache of powder and lead unearthed near the old canoe camp. All four journal-keepers present — Lewis, Clark, Ordway, and Gass — record the same sequence of events, but the texture of their entries diverges sharply, exposing how rank, literacy, and audience shaped what each man chose to preserve.
The Same Events, Four Registers
Gass, the carpenter-sergeant whose published 1807 narrative was the expedition’s first in print, reduces the day to a workmanlike ledger. He notes the six-mile march, the abundance of pitch pine, the dispatch of two Indians after the horses, and the evening tally:
In the evening they all returned with 21 horses and about as many packsaddles. Our horses are generally in good order. Our hunters also returned but had killed nothing.
Ordway, writing in his characteristic compressed hand, supplies the same numbers but adds ethnobotanical detail Gass omits — the plains were "filled with commass wild onions and white roots calld halse & other roots good for food which the natives live on at this Season of the year." Ordway also alone records that "Some of [the horses] had been rode after Deer &C." — a practical observation about how the Nez Perce had used the animals over the winter.
Clark’s entry is the most administratively complete. He gives precise times (9 A.M. departure, 2 P.M. arrival of the hunters, 7–9 P.M. rain turning to snow), distinguishes the principal lodge from a smaller one, and is the only narrator to specify the condition of individual animals: "five of them had been rode & worsted in Such a manner last fall by the Inds. that they had not recovered and are in very low order, and 3 with Sore backs." Where Lewis generalizes, Clark counts.
Lewis as Surveyor of Empire
Lewis’s entry for the same day barely mentions the horses at all. After dispatching the recovery party in two sentences, he pivots into a long disquisition on the agricultural promise of the Nez Perce country:
The country along the rocky mountains for several hundred miles in length and about 50 in width is level extreemly fertile and in many parts covered with a tall and open growth of the longleafed pine…. this country would form an extensive settlement; the climate appears quite as mild as that of similar latitude on the Atlantic coast if not more so and it cannot be otherwise than healthy; it possesses a fine dry pure air.
This is the voice of the Jeffersonian commissioner appraising land for future white settlement, and it has no counterpart in the other three journals. Lewis follows the appraisal with an extended ethnographic note on cous and quamash roots, comparing cous to ginseng and describing the preparation of the dried cakes ("about an inch and 1/4 thick and 6 by 18 in width"). Clark, who often paraphrases Lewis, here goes his own way and merely mentions that the party "precured Some pounded roots of which a Supe was made thick on which we Suped."
The Solitary Lodge: A Telling Comparison
One of the day’s most revealing cross-narrator moments is the description of the menstrual lodge. Both captains note it; the enlisted men do not. Clark records it ethnographically and at some distance:
The Second lodge is Small & appears to be intended for the Sick women who always retire to a Seperate lodge when they have the ____ this Custom is Common to all the nations on this river as well as among all other Indian nations with whom I am acquainted.
Lewis treats the same observation in a markedly more literary — and condescending — register:
even at this small habitation there was an appendage of the soletary lodge, the retreat of the tawny damsels when nature causes them to be driven into coventry.
The contrast is characteristic. Clark generalizes from comparative ethnography ("Common to all the nations"); Lewis reaches for arch eighteenth-century diction ("tawny damsels," "coventry") that aestheticizes what Clark documents. Gass and Ordway, less concerned with self-presentation to a literate audience, pass over the lodge entirely.
What the Pattern Reveals
Read together, the four entries for May 9 show the expedition’s documentary division of labor in miniature. Gass tallies. Ordway adds the subsistence detail of a man who has eaten what he describes. Clark counts horses, times, and lodge-fires with the precision of the party’s principal logistician. Lewis, freed by Clark’s bookkeeping, turns the day into a prospectus for American settlement and a comparative botany of edible roots. The horses are recovered in every account; only in Lewis’s does the country itself become the object of acquisition.
