The journals of June 27, 1806 offer an unusually clean specimen of how the Lewis and Clark expedition’s four active diarists handled a single shared experience. The Corps was deep in the Bitterroot Mountains, retracing under Nez Perce guidance the route they had struggled across the previous September. The day’s events — an early start, a ceremonial pause at a stone cairn, a 28-mile push over snow-covered ridges, a meager camp with little grass — appear in all four accounts. What differs is voice, detail, and dependency.
Gass and Ordway: The Enlisted Register
Sergeant Patrick Gass and Sergeant John Ordway both produce compact entries focused on terrain, pace, and bodily experience. Ordway is the day’s briefest narrator, recording only that the party
took an eairly breakfast and proceeded on verry fast over over the high banks of Snow, the most part of the day and bad moun-tains, we came further to day than we went in 2 when we came over, and Camped on the South Side of a mountain where our horses find a little grass, the day warm and Snow melts fast.
Ordway’s measure of the day is comparative — they covered in one day what had taken two on the westward crossing. Gass, by contrast, lingers on the physical sensation of descent and the strangeness of the season:
The snow is so deep that we cannot wind along the sides of these steeps, but must slide straight down. The horses generally do not sink more than three inches in the snow; but sometimes they break through to their bellies.
Gass also offers the day’s most human aside, noting that traveling over six to eight feet of snow at the end of June “appeared to me somewhat extraordinary,” and adding the practical detail that “most of us, however, had saved our socks as we expected to find snow on these mountains.” Neither sergeant mentions the stone cairn, the smoking ceremony, the Nez Perce account of the fishery at Colt Creek, or Potts’s inflamed leg. These omissions are diagnostic: the enlisted journals concentrate on what the Corps did, while the captains’ journals concentrate on what the Corps witnessed and learned.
Lewis and Clark: Twin Texts
The Lewis and Clark entries for this date are so close in wording that they constitute one of the clearer examples of textual sharing between the captains. Both record the halt at the cairn in nearly identical phrasing. Lewis writes that
on this eminence the natives have raised a conic mound of stones of 6 or eight feet high and on it’s summit erected a pine pole of 15 feet long
Clark’s version reads:
on this eminance the nativs have raised a conic mound of Stons of 6 or 8 feet high and erected a pine pole of 15 feet long.
The same near-duplication runs through the description of the surrounding peaks (“stupendous mountains principally covered with snow”), the admission that without guides the party could not retrace its route, and the praise of the Nez Perce as “most admireable pilots.” The captains’ shared sentence about the scene being “sufficient to have damp[ened] the sperits of any except such hardy travellers as we have become” appears in both journals with only spelling variation. Whether Clark copied Lewis or both worked from a common field draft, the parallelism is unmistakable.
Small divergences are nonetheless revealing. Lewis adds an ethnographic note absent from Clark — that “the indians inform that there is great abundance of Elk in the vally about the Fishery on the Kooskooske River” — consistent with his habitual interest in resource geography. Clark, meanwhile, includes a botanical observation Lewis omits in the surviving fragment: “Near our encampment we saw great numbers of the Yellow lilly with reflected petals in blume.” Clark also dates the prior westward camp to September 16, while Lewis dates it September 18, a minor discrepancy that suggests each captain consulted his own memory or notes rather than a single shared reference.
What Only the Captains Notice
The medical and ethnographic content of the day belongs entirely to Lewis and Clark. Both record the treatment of John Potts’s swollen leg with “the poundd root & leaves of wild ginger,” and both transmit the Nez Perce explanation of the cairn — that men were detached from family parties to fish at Colt Creek and rejoin the main group at the quamash glade on the Kooskooske. Gass and Ordway, riding the same trail and presumably present at the same halt, preserve none of this. The contrast underscores a structural feature of the expedition’s documentary record: the captains operated as ethnographers and naturalists by assignment, while the sergeants’ journals — valuable as independent witnesses to chronology and labor — generally do not duplicate that interpretive work.
