Crossing to the north bank

Gass opens May 14 with frost and labor:

white frost. Three hunters went over very early to the north side of the river. All the rest of the men were employed in collecting our horses and taking over the baggage.

By noon the horses and baggage were across, and the party camped at

the remains of an ancient village on the north side of the Koos-koos-ke river

. Clark and Lewis give the same move with surveyor’s measures: the river about 150 yards wide and extremely rapid; the old habitation a circle some 30 feet across, sunk about four feet, with an earthen wall. Ordway is the enlisted confirmation:

we took our baggage and Swam our horses across the river to the N. Side and mooved a Short distance down the river and Encamped in a Smooth bottom partly covred with young pitch pine in order to stay untill we can cross the mountains

They were settling in to wait out Bitterroot snow. Gass on the 15th says they expected to remain a month.

Bears, and who counted them

Ordway names the hunters: Collins two bear “of the white kind,” Labiche three. Gass, not naming them, reports two at midday and three more by evening,

all of the grizly kind

. Lewis and Clark have Collins’s pair in the morning — one fat male, one lean female with cubs — and Labiche later with a female and two cubs. Lewis uses the mixed colors (black, bay, white-tipped) to argue that the “variagated bear” here is one species, not twenty. Clark adds the Chopunnish valuation: killing one of those animals ranks with killing an enemy in the field. The claws of Collins’s bears went to Hohastillpilp.

Gelding, two methods

Gass records the operation without naming a surgeon:

In the afternoon we had an operation performed on seven of our horses, to render them more peaceable; which was done by one of the natives upon all but one.

Lewis and Clark explain why. The stallions would not trade even at two for one, “Cut each other very much,” and had to be castrated. A Chopunnish man present offered to cut them without tying the cord, scraping it clean first; Drewyer gelded two in the usual way. The next day Clark found those cut by Drewyer the most swollen. That is not Gass noticing a craft the captains ignored — the captains wrote the method; Gass wrote the count.

Stone and pine boughs

They gave bear meat to about fifteen Chopunnish at camp. Gass describes layered hot stones, meat, and brush, covered like a small coal pit, needing about an hour and a half. Clark and Lewis give the fuller procedure: river stones on a brisk fire, pine boughs, flitches of bear, more boughs, a little water, earth four inches deep, about three hours. Lewis tasted it and found it more tender than roast or boiled meat, “but the strong flavor of the pine distroyed it for my pallate.” Ordway’s comparison is the enlisted key:

they cooked it in the Same manner as they Swet their commass roots

The six-thumbed scalp, May 15

The trophy is Gass’s May 15, not May 14. While the party put up sail-cloth and grass shelters, a visitor

had round his neck the scalp of an Indian, with six thumbs and four fingers of the other Indians he had killed in battle, of the Sho-sho-ne, or Snake nation.

Gass adds that the Chopunnish and Shoshone “have been long at war and destroyed a great many of each other in a few years past,” then describes the war-mallet — a club with a wooden or stone head, the stone heads covered with leather and sinew. A printer’s footnote in the 1807 Pittsburgh edition (David McKeehan) compares a similar stone head later seen near the Allegheny; that note is McKeehan’s, not a field sentence. Ordway on the 15th does not mention the scalp. He has a white bear chased on horseback and not killed, a shelter over the old cellar “so as in case of an alarm we can jump in the celler and defend ourSelves,” a bowery for the officers to write in, and five gallons of bear oil kegged for the mountains. Lewis that day is still on bear species, deer-head decoys, and the swollen geldings.

Read across four pens, these two days are the making of Camp Chopunnish: a defensive hollow on the Clearwater, horses cut so they would travel, bear oil for the snow, and one ethnographic page in Gass that the captains, busy with chiefs, species, and surgery, did not write.

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The Same Errand, Four Registers

Gass, who was himself a member of the trading party, gives the briefest account of the crossing:

I went over with five of our party to the village, on the other side of the river; and while we were going some snow fell. The greater part of the natives were out hunting.

Ordway, who remained in camp, condenses the same event into a single weather-and-result line, noting that the men returned with “Some uppah and couse &C.” — the Nez Perce roots that were becoming staples of the party’s diet. His brevity is characteristic: Ordway tracks who went where and what came back.

Clark and Lewis, by contrast, give nearly parallel paragraphs naming the traders individually — Shabono (Charbonneau), Sergeant Gass, McNeal, Whitehouse, and Goodrich — and itemizing the trade goods: “old peces of Sane, fish gig, peces of iron, bullets, and old files,” as Clark lists them, offered “for ropes and Strings for to lash their loads, and bags to Cary their roots in.” Lewis’s wording is so close to Clark’s that the two captains were plainly working from a shared conversation or shared draft, a pattern familiar throughout the return journey. Both note the disappointing yield: “a String each only,” in Clark’s phrasing, and no bags at all.

All four narrators record the gift of a horse from the Nez Perce leader Hohastillpilp to the private Robert Frazier, who had earlier given him a pair of Canadian shoe-packs. Gass adds a humanizing detail the captains omit — that Frazier “is very fond of conversing with them and of learning their language,” a glimpse of one enlisted man’s curiosity that survives only because Gass thought to mention it.

Lewis the Botanist, Clark the Ornithologist

Where the journals diverge most strikingly is in their second halves. Clark devotes the bulk of his entry to a meticulous description of a small bird — almost certainly a western tanager — measured to the quarter-inch:

it measures 7 inches from the extremity of the beak to that of the tail, the latter Occupying 21/2 inches… the plumage is remarkably delicate; that of the neck and head is of a fine orrange yellow and red… the red has the Appearance of haveing been laid over a Ground of yellow.

The painterly observation about red “laid over a Ground of yellow” is unusual for Clark, whose prose more often runs to geography and logistics. He counts the tail feathers (twelve), notes the arrangement of the toes, and records the curvature of the upper mandible.

Lewis, on the same day, turns instead to a wild cherry — likely the bitter cherry (Prunus emarginata) — and produces a description that reads like a formal botanical diagnosis: cortex, petiole, peduncle, bracted secondary peduncles, calix, and petals are all named with technical precision. He compares the fruit to a Kentish cherry and the growth habit to the choke cherry, situating the new species against familiar Eastern reference points.

The division of labor here is suggestive. On a day when both captains had time to write at length, Clark took the bird and Lewis took the plant — a quiet specialization that recurs in the later weeks of the journey, even though Lewis is generally credited as the expedition’s principal naturalist.

What Each Narrator Preserves

Read together, the four entries form a layered record. Ordway preserves the camp’s pulse — weather, who left, who came back. Gass preserves a fellow soldier’s character. Clark and Lewis preserve the diplomatic specifics of trade with the Nez Perce and, between them, two careful scientific descriptions that would otherwise be lost. The cross-narrator pattern at Camp Chopunnish is not one of contradiction but of complementary attention: each pen catches what the others let pass.

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Parallel Texts: Clark’s Council and Lewis’s Borrowing

The most conspicuous textual relationship of the day is between the Lewis and Clark entries. Clark, who actually visited the Broken Arm with Drouillard and three other men, produced the original report of the council. Lewis, remaining in camp without an interpreter (“Drewyer being absent with Capt. C.”), reconstructed the meeting from Clark’s account. The two passages on the Nez Perce timetable for crossing the mountains are nearly identical in wording. Clark writes:

The broken Arm informed me that the nation would not pass the mountains untill the latter part of the Summer, and with respect to the young men who we had requested to accompany us to the falls of Missouri, were not yet Selected for that purpose nor could they be So untill they had a Meeting of the Nation in Council.

Lewis’s version follows the same sentence structure almost verbatim, substituting “scelected” and condensing only slightly. The shared closing line — that the men trading across the river obtained roots and bread “in exchange for a number of little notions, using the Yanke phrase, with which their own enginuity had principally furnished them” — appears in both journals with matching idiosyncratic spelling. This is one of the clearer instances in the late expedition of Lewis writing from Clark’s notes rather than independent observation.

Yet Clark preserves diplomatic material that Lewis omits entirely. Only Clark records the Broken Arm’s account of Shoshone emissaries arriving at the Ye-E-al-po Nation, the chief’s intention to meet them at Lewis’s river and “Smoke the pipe of peace,” and the gift of two pipes — one of which Clark decorated “with blue ribon and white wampom” as “the emblem of peace with us.” This entire diplomatic exchange, the most consequential event of the day, is absent from Lewis’s journal.

Ordway’s Independent Intelligence and Gass’s Compression

John Ordway’s entry is short but contains information neither captain records in the same form. Ordway notes that a man who had stayed at the Commeap village the previous night returned with word that “5 of the Sho-Sho-nee of Snake nation had come to make peace or treaty with this nation.” Where Clark heard the Shoshone news through the Broken Arm’s formal narrative, Ordway received it through the rank-and-file information network of men quartered in Nez Perce villages. The two accounts converge on the same diplomatic development from opposite directions.

Ordway also identifies the visitor who returned with Clark in the evening as “the young chief who gave us Several horses,” cross-referenceable to Lewis’s mention of “Hohastillpilp the two young Cheifs who gave us the horses in behalf of the nation some time since.” The sergeants and the captains were tracking the same individuals under partially overlapping designations.

Patrick Gass, by contrast, reduces the day to a single sentence: five men crossed the river, bought roots, and returned with natives in the evening. Gass’s published 1807 narrative consistently operates at this level of compression, and June 6 illustrates the editorial trade-off — readability at the cost of nearly every concrete detail the other three narrators preserve.

Lewis’s Divergence: The Bird and the River

What distinguishes Lewis’s entry is not the diplomatic material he shares with Clark but the natural-history observations he adds at the end. Lewis turns from the council to the Kooskooske itself:

The Kooskooske is about 150 Yds. wide at this place and discharges a vast body of water; notwithstanding it high state the water remains nearly transparent, and it’s temperature appeas to be quite as cold as that of our best springs.

He then launches into a careful description of “a beautifull little bird,” measuring it at seven inches, comparing its beak to that of the Virginia nightingale, and recording the contrast between the brown upper chap and “greenish yellow” lower chap. None of the other three narrators mentions the bird or the river’s hydrology. This is the characteristic register difference between Lewis and his colleagues during the long camp: while Clark transacts with chiefs and Ordway tracks intelligence, Lewis converts idle days into measured natural history. The diplomatic sentences he borrows from Clark; the ornithology is his alone.

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Shared Events, Divergent Registers

The day’s principal happenings at the main camp are easy to reconstruct because Clark and Lewis record them in nearly identical language. Both note that Goodrich was sent to the village of the Broken Arm for hair to stuff saddle pads; that Reubin and Joseph Field set out to hunt; that Charbonneau, York, and Lepage returned at noon with four bags of cous roots; and that Collins, Shannon, and Colter returned in the evening with eight deer. Lewis writes:

in the evening Collins Shannon and Colter returned with eight deer. they had fortunately discovered a ford on Collins’s Creek where they were enabled to pass it with their horses and had hunted at the quawmash ground where we first met with the Chopunnish last fall.

Clark’s version is virtually word-for-word, with only minor orthographic differences (“Cotter” for “Colter,” “there” for “their”). The pattern—Clark copying Lewis or both copying a shared draft—is well attested for the Camp Chopunnish weeks, and this entry exemplifies it.

Gass, by contrast, compresses the same news into a single sentence:

Some hunters went out this morning, and in the afternoon three of them came in with eight deer; at the same time three more of our men returned from the villages.

Gass names no one, identifies no creek, and omits the cous roots entirely. His entry is the workmanlike report of a sergeant logging the camp’s net intake of meat and men.

Ordway is absent from this convergence altogether. He was off on a separate excursion—evidently a hunting or trading ride with a Nez Perce guide—and his entry describes country none of the others saw that day: a two-hour ride across a plain, then a southward turn through “unlevel timbred country,” sightings of “big horn animel or mountain Sheep” and fourteen deer, a thunderstorm, and a descent down a “bad hill” to a creek and an Indian village. Ordway’s voice on May 28 is the voice of a scout, not a camp diarist; his observations of bighorn sheep have no parallel in any other journal that day.

The Sick Chief, the Cous Root, and the Corvus

Where Clark and Lewis diverge is in what each chooses to expand upon after the shared bulletin. Both record that the sick Nez Perce chief was better and had consented to further sweats—Clark adding the personal note, “I Sincerly wish that the Swetts may restore him”—but from there their pens move in opposite directions.

Clark turns outward, to the country itself, drafting one of his most expansive assessments of the Columbia Plateau as potential settlement land:

this Country would form an extensive Settlement; the Climate appears quit as mild as that of a Similar latitude on the Atlantic Coast; & it cannot be otherwise than healthy; it possesses a fine dry pure air.

He then moves to a careful ethnobotanical description of the cous root, comparing it to ginseng in form and consistence and recording in detail how the Nez Perce rub off the “thin black rhind,” pound it, and dry the cakes “about an inch and 1/4 thick and 6 by 18 in wedth.” The passage is Clark at his most Jeffersonian—evaluating the land for agriculture, the people for their economy, the plants for their utility.

Lewis, by contrast, turns inward to a single bird. After noting that the chief’s child is also improving and that an “imposthume” is advancing to maturity, he launches into an extended description of a corvid he has finally had a chance to examine closely—almost certainly Clark’s nutcracker. Lewis’s prose is the prose of a working naturalist:

this is much larger and has a loud squawling note something like the mewing of a cat. the beak of this bird is 11/2 inches long, is proportionably large, black and of the form which characterizes this genus.

He measures the tail (“four and a half inches in length, composed of 12 feathers”), counts toes, notes the curvature of the nails, and distinguishes the species from the smaller corvid he had described at Fort Clatsop—a self-correction that shows him actively revising his own taxonomy.

Four Pens, One Day

Read together, the May 28 entries map the documentary geography of the expedition with unusual clarity. Gass gives the camp’s bookkeeping. Ordway, away from camp, supplies the only record of a parallel landscape. Clark and Lewis share a common factual core but split their longer reflections between settlement geography and natural history—a division that, across the journals as a whole, accounts for much of the complementary richness of the Lewis and Clark archive.

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Parallel Pens: Lewis and Clark in Near-Lockstep

The most arresting cross-narrator pattern is the close textual correspondence between Lewis’s and Clark’s entries. Both open with the identical formula — Lewis writes

“No movement of the party today worthy of notice. we have once more a good stock of meat and roots.”

Clark’s version differs only in capitalization and the spelling “Bratten” rather than Lewis’s “Bratton.” Both captains then report that the Nez Perce chief under their care

“washed his face himself today”

— a small act of recovered motor function that both men evidently considered worth marking after more than a year of the chief’s incapacity.

The parallelism extends into the natural-history passages. Clark’s description of the horned lizard (“a Species of Lizzard Called by the French engages, Prarie buffaloe”) tracks Lewis’s almost word for word, including the comparison to “the Common black lizzard,” the note that they “crawl much like the toad,” and the coloration of “brown Colour with yellowish and yellowish brown Spots.” The dependency runs from Lewis to Clark: Lewis’s entry continues with a sustained etymological complaint —

“I cannot conceive how the engages ever assimilated this animal with the buffaloe for there is not greater analogy than between the horse and the frog”

— and a botanical description of the choke cherry in bloom, neither of which Clark transcribes. Clark’s copy breaks off mid-description of the lizard’s belly. The pattern, repeatedly observed across the journals, is that Clark imports Lewis’s scientific prose but truncates where Lewis’s curiosity runs longer.

Gass and Ordway: The Other Registers

Patrick Gass, the carpenter-sergeant whose published 1807 narrative was the expedition’s first to reach print, offers on this day only a single sentence: the river

“is rising very fast; which gives us hopes that the snow is leaving the mountains. At 10 o’clock the river ceased rising and the weather became clear.”

Gass’s hydrological observation — keyed to the practical question of when the party can cross the Bitterroots — captures something neither captain records. Lewis and Clark mention only that it was “cloudy and frequently raining” enough to prevent another sweat treatment for the chief; Gass alone tracks the rise, peak, and clearing as a meteorological event with strategic implications.

Ordway’s entry, misdated in the editorial sequence and properly belonging to the party’s later movement toward the Salmon River fishery, operates in yet another register — the ethnographic and economic. He records that

“Frazer got 2 Spanish mill dollars from a squaw for an old razer we expect they got them from the Snake Indians who live near the Spanish country to the South.”

This is precisely the kind of trade-network detail that Lewis and Clark, absorbed in their lizard and choke cherry, do not register. Ordway also describes the protocol of the fishery lodge, where the chief instructs the party

“to set down and not go in the lodge untill we were invited”

— a notation of Indigenous diplomatic etiquette absent from the captains’ more taxonomic writing.

What the Day Reveals

Read together, these entries map the expedition’s documentary specialization. The captains, with leisure imposed by the snowbound delay, turn to the cabinet-of-curiosities work — Lewis composing primary descriptions of the horned lizard (Phrynosoma) and Clark’s later-identified Clark’s nutcracker (“birds of the Corvus genus… a loud squaling note something like the newing of a Cat”). Gass keeps the practical log. Ordway, even when his entry properly belongs to another day, attends to commerce, etiquette, and the texture of Nez Perce hospitality. No single narrator is sufficient: the choke cherry blooms only in Lewis, the Spanish dollar circulates only in Ordway, the river crests only in Gass, and Clark — copying, condensing, sometimes adding (his Corvus passage is his own) — produces the hybrid record that has shaped most subsequent narratives of the expedition’s long Idaho wait.

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The Captains in Near-Lockstep

The Lewis and Clark entries for this date are virtually identical in structure, sequence, and phrasing — a reminder that during the return journey the two captains often shared field notes or copied from one another. Compare Clark’s report of the accident:

on landing on the opposit Shore the Canoe was driven broad Side with the full force of a very Strong Current against Some Standing trees and instantly filled with water and Sunk. Potts who was with them is an indifferent Swimer, it was with dificuelty he made the land. they lost three blankets and a Blanket Cappo and their pittance of Merchindize. in our bear State of Clothing this was a Serious loss.

with Lewis’s:

in landing on the opposite shore the canoe was driven broad side with the full forse of a very strong current against some standing trees and instantly filled with water and sunk. Potts who was with them is an indifferent swimer, it was with much difficulty he made the land. they lost three blankets a blanket coat and their pittance of merchandize. in our bear state of clootheing this was a serious loss.

The differences are almost entirely orthographic — Clark’s “Cappo” for Lewis’s “blanket coat,” Clark’s “dificuelty” for Lewis’s “difficulty.” Both captains then move through the same ordered topics: Pryor’s failed salvage attempt, the recovery of the invalids, the sweat administered to the sick Chief, Joseph Field’s return, and a long natural-history catalogue of reptiles and amphibians. The captains’ shared paragraph on a frog whose body is “covered with little pustles or lumps” appears nearly verbatim in both journals. Whatever the exact mechanism of transmission, the pair functioned as a single editorial voice on this day.

Gass: The Plain Accounting

Sergeant Patrick Gass, whose published journal favored brevity, registers the same accident with very different emphasis. Where the captains foreground command decisions (sending Pryor, permitting Shannon and Collins to cross), Gass treats the event as a problem of supply equity:

The loss of these blankets is the greatest which hath happened to any individuals since we began our voyage, as there are only three men in the party, who have more than a blanket apiece.

This is a detail neither Lewis nor Clark records. The captains call the loss “a Serious loss” in the abstract; Gass quantifies what “bear State of Clothing” actually meant for the enlisted men in late May at 4,000 feet. He also notes — where the captains do not — that the river “is so high that the trees stand some distance in the water,” supplying the physical cause of the accident the captains describe only by its effect.

Ordway: The Ethnographic Eye

Sergeant John Ordway’s entry for the day diverges most sharply from the others. He does not mention the canoe accident at all. Instead, his attention rests on Nez Perce fishing:

the natives roasted an other Salmon & Set before us to eat. in the afternoon we purchased as many Salmon as we thought was necessary to take home and hung them up the most they catch is on the opposite shore along the rocks in the whorls & eddys. we Saw only three dip nets at 3 places a fishing.

Ordway records what the captains’ entries omit entirely: the day’s hospitality, the expedition’s salmon procurement, and a careful observation about where and with what gear the Nez Perce were taking fish. His count — three dip nets at three places — is the kind of empirical detail that neither captain bothers to capture, perhaps because their natural-history paragraphs were already drafted around reptiles and frogs.

Patterns of Witness

Read together, the four entries demonstrate a recurring pattern in the late expedition record. Lewis and Clark function as a coordinated command journal, attentive to personnel, medical progress (the recovering Chief, the invalids), and natural-history compilation. Gass writes from the ranks, foregrounding material conditions — blankets per man, the swollen river — that the captains either generalize or omit. Ordway, characteristically, supplies the ethnographic and subsistence detail that rounds out the day. No single narrator captures the whole; the canoe accident, the sick chief, the salmon trade, and the dip nets in the eddies belong to different observers, and only the composite yields the day at Camp Chopunnish in full.

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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.

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Lewis and Clark: Near-Identical Twins

The captains’ entries for this day are among the clearest demonstrations in the journals of their habit of mutual copying. Lewis writes of Charbonneau and LaPage’s failed trading expedition:

Yesterday evening Charbono an LaPage returned, having made a broken voyage. they ascended the river on this side nearly opposite to a village eight miles above us, here their led horse which had on him their merchandize, feell into the river from the side of a steep clift and swam over.

Clark’s version is virtually word-for-word, with predictable orthographic variants (“Shabono” for “Charbono,” “opposit” for “opposite,” “Clift” capitalized) and one telling substitution: where Lewis writes that the tomahawk “was stolen from us while we lay at the forks,” Clark personalizes it — “the other was stolen from me whilst we lay at the forks.” Similarly, Lewis records the pipe tomahawk as one “which Capt. C. left at our camp on Musquetoe Creek,” while Clark reverses the attribution: “a pipe tomahawk which Capt L. left at our Camp on Musquetor Creek.” These small inversions suggest each captain adapted shared language to his own perspective rather than transcribing mechanically. Clark also renders the Kooskooske as “Flat Head river” — a regional gloss Lewis omits.

Where the two diverge sharply is in Lewis’s lengthy botanical appendix. After the shared narrative of trade misadventures, lost tomahawks, and the absent Twisted Hair, Lewis turns to a flowering plant he has collected:

I met with a singular plant today in blume of which I preserved a specemine; it grows on the steep sides of the fertile hills near this place, the radix is fibrous, not much branched, annual, woody, white and nearly smooth.

The taxonomic register — radix, calyx, corolla superior, four pale perple petals — is entirely Lewis’s. Clark omits the plant altogether. This is the standard pattern of the late expedition: shared logistical narrative, divergent specialist observation.

Gass: The Detail the Captains Miss

Sergeant Patrick Gass’s entry is brief — a paragraph against Lewis’s page — but it preserves an ethnographic and zoological detail the captains pass over in silence on this date. Gass records:

The officers got some bear skins from the Indians, that are almost as white as a blanket. They say that the bears from which they get these skins are a harmless kind, and not so bold and ferocious as the. grizly and brown bear.

The acquisition of these unusually pale bear skins, and the Nez Perce informants’ classification of bear types by temperament rather than color alone, is exactly the sort of cross-cultural natural-history note one might expect Lewis to seize upon. Yet on June 1 Lewis is preoccupied with his unidentified flower, and Clark with the day’s logistical setbacks. Gass also notes the river’s eighteen-inch overnight rise — a hydrological data point absent from the captains’ versions, though directly relevant to their travel planning. His shorter entries frequently capture exactly such practical specifics.

Ordway: A Voice from Elsewhere

The Ordway entry assigned to this date belongs to a different geography entirely. While Lewis writes that “we begin to feel some anxiety with rispect to Sergt. Ordway and party who were sent to Lewis’s river for salmon; we have received no inteligence of them since they set out,” Ordway himself is moving through Nez Perce country toward the forks of the Kooskooskee, trading for food and observing horse markets:

their is a vast site of excellent horses Scattered along this river which they offer to Sell for a Squaw axe pr peace & 2 or 3 for a gun & a little ammun’

His tone is the steady field diary of a non-commissioned officer: route, distances, lodges passed, hospitality received from “the chiefs lodge that gave us so many horses.” The juxtaposition is poignant. The captains record their worry about him; he, unaware of their concern, records the friendliness of his hosts and the abundance of horseflesh. Only when the parties reunite will these two narrative streams converge — and the editors’ decision to print Ordway’s June 1 entry alongside the captains’ anxious mention of him is itself a piece of retrospective ordering, not a same-day exchange.

Read together, the four entries demonstrate the layered nature of the expedition record: a shared captains’ draft, a sergeant’s terser corrective, and a distant field diary stitched into the chronology after the fact.

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Parallel Brevity in the Sergeants’ Journals

Gass and Ordway record nearly identical skeletons of the day. Both note the canoe’s completion and launching; both report the hunters’ return without game; both mention the purchase of roots from a native village. Gass writes plainly:

ished our canoe and put her into the water. — In the afternoon two hunters came in, but had not killed any thing: they had procured some roots at a village about fourteen miles up the river. Our stock of provisions is exhausted, and we have nothing to eat but some roots, which we get from the natives at a very dear rate.

Ordway’s version covers the same ground but supplies a different texture — he names the trade goods specifically (“Shappalell and couse roots”) and notes that “the river riseing,” a detail Gass omits. Where Gass editorializes about the “very dear rate” charged by the Nez Perce, Ordway records the transaction neutrally as a purchase of “considerable” stores. The two sergeants are clearly not copying one another verbatim, but their shared framework — canoe, hunters, roots — suggests a common camp-conversation source rather than independent observation.

The Captains’ Medical and Diplomatic Detail

Clark and Lewis, by contrast, devote substantial space to two patients invisible in the sergeants’ accounts: Sacagawea’s child, Jean Baptiste, and the paralyzed Nez Perce chief whom the captains have been treating. Clark notes that “The Child Something better this morning tho the Swelling yet continues. we Still apply the onion poltice.” Lewis adds clinical specificity: “The Clyster given the Child last evening operated very well. it is clear of fever this evening and is much better, the swelling is considerably abated and appears as if it would pass off without coming to a head.”

Both captains describe the same regimen prescribed for the ailing chief — “a few dozes of flour of sulpher and Creem of tartar & some portable soupe” — with directions that he be taken home and sweated. Lewis alone notices the Nez Perce reluctance to comply: “they seemed unwilling to comply with the latter part of the injunction for they consumed the day and remained with us all night.” This sort of social-political reading is characteristic of Lewis throughout the expedition; Clark records the prescription, Lewis records the resistance.

Who Notices What

Several details appear in only one narrator’s account. Lewis specifies the geography of the Field brothers’ aborted hunt — “Commearp Creek at about 11/2 Ms. and a second creek reather larger at 3 Ms. further” — and identifies the village as one “which our traders have never yet visited.” Clark, more practical, names the parties dispatched to trade: Sergeant Pryor with four men, and “Shabono & york” sent to procure roots for the captains’ own mess. Lewis’s parallel passage adds LePage to the second party, a small discrepancy useful to scholars reconstructing daily assignments.

Clark uniquely reports that “one of our men Saw a Salmon in the river to day. and two others eat of Salmon at the near Village which was brought from Lewis’s river.” Lewis mentions only the sighting, not the eating. The salmon detail matters: it is the first credible sign of the seasonal run that the expedition has been anticipating, and Clark’s fuller notice — including the fish’s provenance from the Snake — preserves intelligence Lewis lets slip.

All four narrators converge on the day’s most consequential observation, recorded most plainly by Clark: “the riseing very fast and Snow appear to melt on the Mountains.” Lewis echoes it almost word for word: “the river still rising fast and snows of the mountains visibly diminish.” For the Corps, this was the line that mattered most. The canoe was finished, the larder was empty, and the mountains were beginning, at last, to release them.

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Captains in Parallel: Clark Copies, Lewis Editorializes

The most striking textual relationship is between William Clark and Meriwether Lewis. Their entries run nearly word-for-word through long passages — a familiar pattern for this stretch of the journey, in which Clark transcribes from Lewis’s field notes (or vice versa) with light modification. Compare the captains on Hohastillpilp’s offer of his herd. Clark writes:

hohastillpilp told us that most of the horses which we Saw running in those plains in this neighbourhood at large belonged to himself and his people, and whenever we were in want of meet, he requested that would kill any of them we wished; this is a piece of liberallity which would do honour to Such as host of civilization.

Lewis preserves the sentence verbatim and then extends it with a characteristic moral aside:

indeed I doubt whether there are not a great number of our countrymen who would see us fast many days before their compassion would excite them to a similar act of liberallity.

Clark stops at the praise; Lewis turns the praise into an indictment of his own countrymen. The pattern recurs throughout the day’s entry. Where Clark notes the sick chief has been “helpless for near 5 years,” Lewis writes “upwards of three years” — a small but telling discrepancy that suggests the captains were working from independent recollections of what the Nez Perce family had told them, even where their prose otherwise aligns. Both then pivot, in identical language, to the burrowing squirrel, beginning the careful zoological measurements (“1 foot 5 inches & a half from the nose to the extremity of the tail”) that mark their shared natural-history register.

The Sergeants’ Different Eyes

Patrick Gass and John Ordway, the two sergeants journaling this day, do not echo the captains and barely echo each other. Gass, ever the laconic carpenter-turned-chronicler, compresses the day into a workmanlike inventory:

We therefore killed another horse to day, which one of the natives gave us some time ago for that purpose. He was so wild and vicious that we could not manage him or do any thing with him.

This detail — that the gift horse was unmanageable — appears in no other journal. Lewis and Clark frame the killing as a meditation on Nez Perce generosity; Gass frames it as a practical solution to a livestock problem. Gass alone also notes that the horses subjected to “the quieting operation” (gelding) are “all mending,” tracking the camp’s veterinary recovery as carefully as he tracks the human patients.

Ordway’s entry is the day’s outlier because Ordway himself is the outlier: he is the one sent away. While the captains and Gass record his departure in a single line, Ordway is writing from the trail, describing the swim across the river with the horses, the ascent to “a high hill on a plain,” and arrival at a chief’s village some thirteen miles up Commeap Creek. He closes with a domestic detail no one in camp could have supplied:

we camped here, and had a hard Thunder Shower, the Indians grass houses leak.

The captains, back at Long Camp, mention no rain at all; Gass logs only that “some rain fell” in the afternoon. Ordway’s storm — and the leaking lodge — is the kind of granular, embodied observation that the field journal captures and the command journal smooths away.

The Sweat Lodge: Medicine as Ethnography

All three Long Camp journalists note the second sweat treatment of the paralyzed chief, but their framings diverge. Gass reports it as a procedure (“The Indian, that we have under cure, had another sweat to day”). Clark and Lewis, working from the same underlying notes, expand the episode into ethnographic reflection on Chopunnish family life, observing that the chief’s father performed “all the drugery” and that the Nez Perce “treat their women with more respect than the nativs on the Missouri” (Clark) or “the nations of the Missouri” (Lewis). The editorial gloss appended to Ordway’s published journal — describing John Shields’s earlier, successful sweat cure of William Bratton — supplies a context the captains’ May 27 entries assume but do not state: this Nez Perce treatment is being modeled on a remedy the expedition had just borrowed back from one of its own men. Across four narrators, a single afternoon at Camp Chopunnish becomes a layered record of cross-cultural medicine, careful taxonomy, and the small frictions — wild horses, leaking roofs, disagreements about how long a man has been ill — that distinguish one journal-keeper from another.

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