The journals of May 31, 1806, written from Camp Chopunnish as the expedition waited for snow to clear from the Bitterroot passes, offer an unusually clear view of how labor was divided among the four narrators. Lewis and Clark devote nearly all their ink to a single ethnographic and zoological question: are the bears of the Clearwater country one species or two? Gass condenses the day into camp logistics. Ordway, meanwhile, is not at camp at all—his entry records a separate fishing reconnaissance along the Salmon River.
Parallel Pens: Lewis and Clark on Hoh-host and Yack-kah
The most striking feature of the day’s record is the near-verbatim agreement between the two captains. Goodrich and Willard had visited a Nez Perce village, and Willard returned with a dressed bear skin of a “uniform pale redish brown colour” that the Indians insisted was not the white bear (Hoh-host) but a different animal, the Yack-kah. Both captains seize on this distinction and produce essentially the same paragraph.
Clark writes:
the White, the deep and pale red grizzle, the dark brown grizzle, and all those that had the extremities of the hair of a White or frosty Colour without reguard to the Colour of the ground of the poil, they disignated Hoh-host and assured us that they were the Same with the White bear, that they associated together, were very vicisious, never climb the trees, and had much longer nails than the others.
Lewis records the identical observation with only minor orthographic variation (“plale red grizzle,” “ascosiated”). The pattern of textual dependence is unmistakable: one captain copied from the other, or both worked from a shared draft. Small tells confirm the relationship. Clark notes that Willard “had purchased для me”—that is, for Clark personally—while Lewis writes that the skin was purchased “for Capt. C.” Likewise, the “very nearly white” skin is “which Capt Lewis had purchased” in Clark’s text and “which I had purchased” in Lewis’s. Each captain has localized the third-person and first-person references to fit his own voice, but the underlying sentences are otherwise the same.
The reasoning that follows is also shared. Both men accept the Nez Perce taxonomy, observing that the short-clawed, tree-climbing Yack-kah must be a species distinct from the common black bear of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, citing as evidence a reddish-brown cub, “pup to a female black bear intermixed with entire white hairs,” that had been seen climbing a tree. The captains had previously assumed the shorter claws on some Clearwater bears reflected wear from “scratching out roots”; Indigenous testimony overturns that assumption.
Gass at Camp, Ordway on the Salmon
Patrick Gass, writing in his characteristically compressed register, ignores the bear question entirely. His entry catalogues the practical state of the camp: hunters dispatched for venison, a deer killed swimming the river, a sunken canoe still lying “under water at the opposite shore,” and the recovery of one more horse from the Indian villages. He closes with weather—”some rain with sharp thunder and lightning”—and the return of the hunters. Where Lewis and Clark produce paragraphs of comparative zoology, Gass produces a logbook.
John Ordway’s entry comes from a different geography altogether. He is on the return leg of the salmon-fishing party sent across to the Salmon River (which he renders by its Indigenous name, “Toomonamah” or “Thommonama”). His prose is a traveler’s itinerary: an old chief who “stayed as they had got no fish yet,” a guide’s recommendation of a “nearer & a better road,” two boys sent to show the way, “a verry bad hill,” and a camp made near a large village “as night came on.” Ordway’s geographic vocabulary—particularly his preservation of the Sahaptian river name—is a register Lewis and Clark do not reproduce on this date.
Convergence in the Closing Lines
The captains’ entries converge again at the close of the day, both noting that “Joseph and R. Feilds” (Lewis) or “Joseph and Reuben Fields” (Clark) returned with three deer, and that the Nez Perce had brought in another of the expedition’s “origional Stock of horses,” leaving only two unaccounted for—those the “shoshone guide rode back when he returned.” Gass independently confirms this last detail, noting the recovered horse “is the last, except the two which they assure us the old Snake guide took.” The agreement across three narrators on the horse count, against Ordway’s silence (he was absent), is a useful reminder that the journals’ apparent redundancy is sometimes the only mechanism by which a single fact survives multiple hands.
