The journal entries for June 4, 1806, offer a textbook case of how rank and role shaped what the four expedition diarists chose to preserve. While the Corps of Discovery waited at Camp Chopunnish for the Bitterroot snows to melt, three Nez Perce chiefs concluded a multi-day council and returned to their villages near noon. That diplomatic departure dominates the entries of the two captains and is entirely absent from those of Patrick Gass and John Ordway, who instead note the river level, the weather, and the return of hunter John Shields with two deer.
Lewis and Clark: Parallel Diplomatic Drafts
The most striking feature of the day’s record is the near-verbatim correspondence between the Lewis and Clark entries. Both captains open with the same clause — “about noon the 3 chiefs left us and returned to their vilages” — and proceed through an identical summary of the council’s unresolved business: the chiefs’ refusal to travel to the Missouri before late summer, their plan to winter east of the Rockies, and their non-committal response to a request that young Nez Perce men accompany Lewis to the falls of the Missouri to mediate with the Blackfoot and Minnetares of Fort de Prairie.
The two texts diverge only in person and in one substantive addition. Where Lewis writes in the first person — “two or three of their young men should accompany me to the falls of the Missouri” — Clark substitutes the third: “two or three of their young men Should accompany Capt L.” Clark also includes a paragraph absent from Lewis’s entry, recording his own parallel request:
I also urged the necessaty of Sending one or two of their Considerate men to accompany me by way of the Shoshonees on the head of Jeffersons river and about the three forks of the Missouri… by which means a message Sent to that nation & good understanding brought about between the Shoshones and the Chopunnish Nations which appears to be the wish of both Nations.
The pattern suggests Clark copied from Lewis’s draft (or a shared source) and then appended material specific to his own planned route through Shoshone country after the captains’ separation at Travelers’ Rest. The shared phrasing about Broken Arm’s invitation — he “wished to speak to us before we set out, and that he had some roots to give us for our journey over the mountains” — closes both entries identically, with only the pronoun shifting (“I promised to visit him” in Clark; “Capt. C. promised to visit him” in Lewis).
Gass and Ordway: The Camp at Eye Level
The enlisted-man perspective could hardly be more different. Sergeant Gass devotes his entire entry to environmental observation:
The river fell considerably yesterday, and in the night rose only an inch and an half. At noon one of our hunters came in with two deer he had killed. The afternoon was clear and pleasant.
Sergeant Ordway’s record is even briefer and tracks the same three subjects — weather, hunter, deer — though he is the only narrator on this date to name Shields explicitly: “one of our hunters John Shields came in had killed 2 Deer and brought in the meat.” The captains both mention Shields by name as well, but only at the close of their entries, almost as an afterthought to the diplomatic business.
Notable, too, is the disagreement on the morning’s weather. Gass calls the afternoon “clear and pleasant” without characterizing the morning; Ordway specifies “a wet morning” before the “after part of the day fair.” Neither captain comments on the weather at all — a consistent pattern across the Long Camp entries, where Lewis and Clark increasingly delegate meteorological notation to the sergeants while reserving their own pages for ethnographic and diplomatic content.
What the Pattern Reveals
Read together, the four June 4 entries illustrate the layered documentary strategy of the expedition. Lewis and Clark functioned as a two-person diplomatic chancery, drafting parallel records of inter-tribal negotiations that would later inform official reports to Jefferson. Gass and Ordway, by contrast, maintained the ledger of daily camp life — game brought in, river stages, sky conditions — that the captains could draw on but rarely duplicated. The hunter Shields appears in all four entries, but only Ordway treats him as the day’s protagonist. For the captains, the protagonists were the departing chiefs, and the unresolved question of whether young Nez Perce men would carry the expedition’s message of peace into the country of the Blackfoot and the Shoshone.
