The June 11 entries divide cleanly along a geographic seam. Lewis is gone — he set out at 8 A.M. with Drouillard, Gibson, Joseph Field, and Goodrich to push west toward the Snowy Mountains and resolve which fork was the true Missouri. Clark, Ordway, Gass, and Whitehouse remain at the Marias junction, burying baggage and repairing arms. Two journals follow Lewis up the Missouri; three stay behind at the cache. The result is an unusually bifurcated record in which the most dramatic events of the day — Lewis’s intestinal collapse and his chokecherry experiment — appear in only one narrator’s hand.
The Cache: Ordway, Whitehouse, Clark, and Gass
The inventory of buried supplies appears in three nearly parallel lists. Ordway records the party cached
1 keg of powder 1 bar led. 1 keg flour. 1 keg pork 2 kegs parchd meal the bellows & tolls, augur plains, Saws axes tin cups dutch ovens, bear Skins packs of beaver Skins buffalow Robes, & a nomber of other articles
Whitehouse’s list is virtually identical in sequence and phrasing —
1 keg of powder 1 bar led, 1 keg flour 1 keg pork 2 kegs parched meal the bellowses & tools augur plains Saw &c.
— confirming the well-documented pattern of Whitehouse copying from or sharing notes with Ordway. Whitehouse adds one item Ordway omits: “a corn hand mill.” Clark’s enumeration runs differently, organized by container and including “2 Musquits,” “files Chisel,” “Beaver Traps,” and explicit mention that the powder canisters were buried “in 2 seperate places all with Lead” — a redundancy precaution the enlisted men do not record. Gass, terse as ever, mentions only that “the rest of the party were engaged in burying the baggage” and skips the inventory entirely, his attention already on the following day’s march.
Ordway and Whitehouse alone preserve the small ethnographic-natural-history note that the men had been catching
one kind of flat Scalled fish that we never Saw the kind before
Lewis, writing from his sickbed miles upstream, devotes a full paragraph to the same two species — describing teeth, eye color, iris, flesh quality, and comparing the second to the “Hickory Shad or old wife.” The enlisted men note novelty; Lewis catalogues. The convergence on the same fish from two separated camps is one of the day’s quiet pleasures of the combined record.
Two Patients, Two Improvisations
The day’s medical drama is doubled and entirely invisible if read from any single journal. Lewis, hours into his westward push, was struck with
such violent pain in the intestens that I was unable to partake of the feast of marrowbones
Carrying no medicine, he improvised: chokecherry twigs stripped, cut, and boiled into
a strong black decoction of an astringent bitter tact
Two doses by 10 P.M. and the fever broke. The episode appears nowhere else — Clark would not learn of it for days.
Clark, meanwhile, was treating his own patient. Buried in a single sentence at the close of his entry:
the Indian woman verry Sick, I blead her which appeared to be of great Service to her
This is the opening of Sacagawea’s serious illness, which would worsen over the following week and nearly kill her before Lewis rejoined the main party and took over her care. Ordway, Whitehouse, and Gass say nothing of it. Only Clark notes she is sick at all.
What the Combined Record Adds
Read together, the entries show the expedition functioning as two organisms on June 11: a reconnaissance cell improvising medicine in the field, and a logistics cell at the Marias compressing tons of equipment into the ground. Each captain became, on the same day, a frontier physician — Lewis dosing himself with boiled chokecherry, Clark opening Sacagawea’s vein. Neither knew of the other’s patient. Gass’s brevity, the Ordway-Whitehouse near-duplication, Clark’s container-by-container precision, and Lewis’s solitary clinical narrative together produce a fuller day than any single journal preserves. The fish descriptions, appearing independently in the two camps, also confirm that the unfamiliar species had been a topic of camp talk for some days before anyone wrote it down.
