The September 17, 1805 entries from Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark converge on a single grim fact: the Corps of Discovery, lost in the Bitterroot Mountains and unable to subsist on the few pheasants its hunters could find, killed a colt for supper. Yet the three narrators arrive at this fact along very different rhetorical paths, and a careful reading reveals how each man’s training, station, and temperament shaped his record of the same hungry day.
Three Registers of Deprivation
Clark, as commanding officer, frames the killing in language that is at once euphemistic and unflinching. After noting that the hunters’ few pheasants were insufficient, he writes:
a coalt being the most useless part of our Stock he fell a Prey to our appetites.
The construction is striking. Clark momentarily personifies the colt (“he fell a Prey”) while simultaneously reducing it to a logistical calculation — “the most useless part of our Stock.” The sentence reads almost as a justification entered into the official record, the kind of phrasing an officer might offer if called to account for the loss of expedition property.
Ordway, a sergeant, writes with the plainness of a working soldier. He records simply that hunger “oblidged us to kill another colt the last we had,” and immediately pivots to the disappointing news that “one of the hunters chased a bear up the Mountain but could not kill it.” For Ordway, the colt is one item among several in a day’s report; the word “another” — and the chilling phrase “the last we had” — quietly establishes that this is not the first such slaughter and that the supply of substitute meat is now exhausted.
Gass’s account, by contrast, is the most narratively developed. Writing in a journal that would later be published, Gass takes time to dramatize both the necessity and the men’s response:
on which without a miracle it was impossible to feed 30 hungry men and upwards, besides some Indians… Some of the men did not relish this soup, and agreed to kill a colt; which they immediately did, and set about roasting it; and which appeared to me to be good eating.
Gass alone preserves the human texture of the moment — the men’s distaste for Lewis’s portable soup, the collective decision to slaughter the colt, and his own approving verdict on the meal. He is also the only one of the three to identify the alternative provision (“portable soup”) and to credit Lewis with bringing it along “in case of necessity.”
What Each Narrator Notices
The entries diverge sharply in their attention to landscape and natural history. Gass, who often functions as the expedition’s informal botanist-of-convenience, catalogs the vegetation: “service-berry bushes hanging full of fruit,” “black elder and bore-tree, pitch and spruce pine all growing together.” Neither Clark nor Ordway mentions a single plant.
Ordway, meanwhile, attends most closely to the trail conditions and the sensory experience of travel. He alone notes that “the Snow melted of[f] the timber” and that “the water Stood in the trail over our mock[asins],” and he alone reports the auditory detail that closes his entry: “we hear wolves howl some distance a head.” That howling — left without commentary — does the narrative work that Clark accomplishes through formal phrasing and Gass through explicit dramatization.
Clark, characteristically, is the surveyor. He measures the day (“only 10 miles”), tracks the drainage (“the ridge devideing the waters of two Small rivers”), and notes that “two horses fell & hurt themselves very much” — a practical concern about the expedition’s diminishing transport capacity that neither sergeant raises in the same terms, though Ordway describes the same terrain of “high rocks and high pricipicies.”
A Note on Dating and Sequence
Readers should be aware that Gass’s published journal, in the passage reproduced here, is dated to the 14th and 15th rather than the 17th, and the colt-killing he describes appears to refer to an earlier incident in the same hungry sequence. The Gass passage is included alongside the Clark and Ordway entries because editors of the Lewis and Clark Research Database have grouped these accounts as parallel records of the Bitterroot starvation crisis. The discrepancy itself is instructive: Gass’s published text was reworked by his editor David McKeehan, and the resulting narrative smooths and reorders events that Clark and Ordway logged day by day. Where Clark and Ordway record the killing of the colt on the 17th, Gass’s version places a comparable scene a few days earlier — a reminder that the published Gass is a literary artifact at one remove from the field journal.
Read together, the three accounts demonstrate how a single act of desperation enters the historical record in three keys: Clark’s officer’s prose, Ordway’s sergeant’s log, and Gass’s published narrative shaped for a reading public.
