The 7th of August 1806 was meant to bring the divided expedition back together. Lewis’s party, descending the Missouri, expected to find Clark waiting at the mouth of the Yellowstone. Instead they found an abandoned camp, a pole stuck at the point, and the laconic remains of a note. The four surviving accounts — by Lewis, Clark, Gass, and Ordway — together reconstruct a missed rendezvous and offer a striking case study in how the expedition’s narrators differed in scope, detail, and register.
The Same Event, Four Registers
Clark, encamped downstream and unaware of his colleagues’ approach, devotes his entry to weather and comfort. He notes the morning rain that “wet us all,” the wind that “blew very hard for about 2 hours,” and ends with what mattered most to a man who had spent weeks tormented by insects:
the air was exceedingly Clear and Cold and not a misquetor to be Seen, which is a joyfull circumstance to the Party.
Lewis, meanwhile, produces by far the longest entry of the day — a sweeping document that braids natural history, geography, and narrative suspense. He records the shifted entrance of Martha’s River, the first appearance of elm, dwarf cedar, and ash on the bluffs, the “Coal birnt hills and pumicestone,” and a remarkable observation on grizzly behavior: that the bears “resort the river where they lie in wate at the crossing places of the game for the Elk and weak cattle.” He even notices “an unusual flight of white gulls about the size of a pigeon with the top of their heads black.”
Gass and Ordway, the enlisted journalists, compress the same day into workmanlike paragraphs centered on progress, distance, and game.
The Pole, the Paper, and the Sand
The most revealing cross-narrator pattern emerges in how each writer describes the evidence Clark left behind. Gass reports finding “a few words written or traced in the sand, which were ‘W.C. a few miles further down on the right hand side.’” Ordway agrees that Clark “left a line that we would find them lower down.” Lewis, characteristically, gives the fullest account:
I found a paper on a pole at the point which mearly contained my name in the hand wrighting of Capt. C. we also found the remnant of a note which had been attatched to a peace of Elk’s horns in the camp; from this fragment I learned that game was scarce at the point and musquetoes troublesome which were the reasons given for his going on.
The discrepancy is telling. Gass remembers writing in the sand; Lewis describes a paper on a pole and a fragmentary note tied to elk antlers — apparently gnawed or scattered by animals. The enlisted men may have conflated multiple message-traces, or Gass, writing later from memory or notes, simplified what Lewis recorded with forensic precision. Ordway’s phrasing — “left a line” — splits the difference, suggesting the men understood the gist without registering the specific media.
All four agree on the response: Lewis wrote a fresh note for the missing hunters Colter and Collins, “wraped in leather and attatced onto the same pole.” Gass and Ordway both flag this detail, recognizing that the men still behind needed instructions. The pole at the Yellowstone’s mouth thus became a layered communication device, with Clark’s name, Lewis’s reply, and the implied chain of expected readers.
What Each Narrator Notices Alone
Several observations appear in only one journal. Lewis alone records the shifted mouth of Martha’s River and the geological transition to burnt hills and pumice. Ordway alone notes the still-warm Indian camp downstream — “1 of which had fire at it and dry meat hanging up” — a detail with potential security implications that neither captain mentions. Gass alone tallies the day’s distance with characteristic bluntness: “coming above 100 miles.” Clark, isolated from the others, records a bear sighting on the bank from his own vantage downstream — a separate animal from the bears Lewis and Ordway describe, since the parties had not yet reunited.
The convergence on the killed buffalo at evening camp — noted by both Gass and Ordway but absent from Lewis’s truncated entry — suggests the enlisted men coordinated their accounts or shared a common informant, a pattern observed elsewhere in the journals. Clark, miles downstream, ate differently and wrote differently, his entry shaped by the solitude of a divided command waiting for a reunion that would not come for two more days.
