The entries for May 20, 1806 from Camp Chopunnish offer an unusually clean test case in cross-narrator comparison. All four journalists — Lewis, Clark, Ordway, and Gass — describe the same rain-soaked day, the same returning hunters, and the same wounded game lost in the snow. Yet each entry preserves details the others omit, and the textual relationships among them illuminate the documentary hierarchy of the expedition.
Lewis and Clark: Near-Identical Twins
The most striking feature of the day’s record is the close parallel between the captains’ journals. Lewis writes that the rain continued untill noon when it cleared away about an hour and then rained at intervals untill 4 in the evening
, while Clark records the rain ceased untill meridean when it Cleared away for an hour and began to rain and rained at entervals untill 4 P.M.
The shared structure, identical timing, and parallel phrasing confirm what scholars have long observed about this stretch of the journals: one captain was working from the other’s draft, or the two were composing in close consultation.
The shared complaint about their bedding is particularly vivid. Lewis notes that our covering is so indifferent that Capt C. and myself lay in the water the greater part of the last night
; Clark echoes that our Covering was so indefferent that Capt Lewis and my self was wet in our bed all the latter part of the night.
The captains were sharing a tent, and apparently a narrative voice. Gass, writing from outside that tent, supplies the consequence the captains do not mention: the men made a small lodge of poles and covered it with grass, for Captain Lewis and Captain Clarke, as their tent is not sufficient to defend them from the rain.
Only through Gass do we learn that the enlisted men responded to the captains’ soaked night by building them a grass shelter.
Ordway’s Compression, Gass’s Forward View
Ordway’s entry is, as often, the most compressed. He notes simply that Colter and Shannon had killd nothing but had wounded a white bear
and that Labiche returned with the flesh of a large black taild Deer.
His identification of the bear as a white bear — expedition shorthand for grizzly — is a detail neither captain specifies; Lewis and Clark refer only to a bear.
Ordway also observes that the Deer are Scarse & verry wild,
a hunter’s-eye assessment absent from the officers’ accounts.
Gass, by contrast, looks ahead. Where the captains and Ordway focus on the day’s weather and returns, Gass alone records the camp’s logistical planning: some men set about making a canoe to fish in, when the salmon come up, as we do not expect to leave this place before the middle of June.
This sentence belongs to Gass’s entry for the 21st, but it reflects the same camp activity the captains witnessed and chose not to document. Gass consistently registers the rhythm of enlisted labor — canoe-building, lodge-building, fishing preparations — that the captains’ more event-driven prose passes over.
What Only Lewis Records
One detail appears in Lewis’s entry alone: the trade in brass buttons. Lewis observes that brass buttons is an article of which these people are tolerably fond, the men have taken advantage of their prepossession in favour of buttons and have devested themselves of all they had in possesson which they have given in exchange for roots and bread.
Clark, copying or paralleling Lewis on most of the day’s events, omits this passage entirely. The episode reveals both an ethnographic observation Lewis found worth preserving and the deteriorating state of the men’s uniforms — they were stripping their own coats to barter for food. Ordway and Gass, who would have been among those bartering, say nothing of it.
The day thus offers a useful reminder that no single journal, however authoritative, contains the full record. The captains supply the chronology and the diplomatic detail; Ordway supplies hunter’s vernacular and species precision; Gass supplies the labor of the camp and the comfort of the officers. Read together, the four entries reconstruct a wet, hungry, restless day at Long Camp far more completely than any one of them can alone.
