The journal entries of July 7, 1806 capture the Lewis and Clark Expedition at a moment of geographic and narrative bifurcation. Having divided the Corps at Travelers’ Rest, the captains pursued separate routes — Lewis pressing northeast toward the Great Falls of the Missouri, Clark moving southeast toward the Three Forks. The four surviving accounts from this date — by Lewis, Clark, Gass, and Ordway — reveal not only divergent landscapes but divergent habits of attention, register, and authorial purpose.
Lewis’s Surveyor’s Eye and Gass’s Plain Echo
Lewis’s entry reads as a surveyor’s field book. He organizes the day by compass course and distance — “N. 75 E. 6 M.,” “North 6 ms.,” “N. 15 E. 8 m.” — appending botanical and zoological observations to each leg. He notes that there has been “no longleafed pine since we left the praries of the knobs,” remarks beaver workings (“much appearance of beaver many dams”), and tucks in the small domestic detail that “my dog much worried.” His crossing of the Continental Divide is rendered almost casually:
passing the dividing ridge betwen the waters of the Columbia and Missouri rivers at 1/4 of a mile from this gap which is low and an easy ascent on the W. side the fort mountain bears North Eaast, and appears to be distant about 20 Miles.
Patrick Gass, traveling with Lewis’s party, narrates the same passage but strips it of trigonometric scaffolding. Where Lewis records bearings, Gass offers landscape impressions: “the valley, which is very beautiful with a great deal of clover in its plains,” and atop the ridge, “two beautiful ponds, of about three acres in size.” Gass’s distance estimate — “32 miles” for the day — substantially exceeds Lewis’s tallied courses, a discrepancy that recurs throughout the parallel record and reflects Gass’s reliance on perceived rather than measured travel. Gass also captures a moment of confused reckoning that Lewis omits: the party “struck a small stream, which we at first thought was of the head waters of the Missouri, but found it was not.” Such admissions of error are characteristic of Gass and rarely appear in the captains’ polished entries.
Clark’s Crisis and Ordway’s Continuation
Clark’s entry from the southeastern party opens not with geography but with alarm: nine horses are missing. His prose, ordinarily as compass-driven as Lewis’s, becomes investigative. He weighs the evidence for theft carefully:
they had reasons to believe that the indians had Stolen them in the course of the night, and founded their reasons on the quallity of the horses, all being the most valuable horses we had, and Several of them so attached to horses of inferior quallity which we have they could not be Seperated from each other
Clark concludes it “probable that they might be stolen by Some Skulking Shoshones” — a striking accusation against a nation that had only months earlier provisioned the expedition. He nevertheless leaves “Sergt. Ordway, Shannon, Gibson Collins & Labeech” to search, and pushes on.
John Ordway’s entry is the indispensable complement to Clark’s, because it narrates what Clark could not witness — the search itself. Ordway records that he and Labiche “got on the track of the horses and followed it on untill towards evening and found them still going on an Indn road.” The horses were recovered. Ordway’s account thus partially exonerates the Shoshones whom Clark had suspected: the horses had drifted (or been driven) along an Indian trail but were retrieved without confrontation. Ordway also adds the meteorological note Clark omits — “Several Showers of rain & Thunder in the course of this afternoon.”
The Boiling Spring: A Detail Only Clark Records
Among the day’s observations, none is more vivid than Clark’s description of a thermal spring near the Three Forks of Willard’s Creek. Clark not only describes the phenomenon but conducts an impromptu experiment, directing Pryor and Shields to immerse pieces of meat:
the one about the Size of my 3 fingers Cooked dun in 25 minits the other much thicker was 32 minits before it became Sufficiently dun. this water boils up through some loose hard gritty Stone. a little sulferish
This experimental impulse — measuring cookery time by meat thickness — is quintessentially Clarkian. Lewis, on the same day, notes natural phenomena (beaver dams, plant transitions) but rarely intervenes to test them. Ordway and Gass, lacking the captains’ scientific training and instruments, do not record temperatures, sulfur, or controlled trials.
Read together, the four entries reconstruct a day no single narrator could have rendered alone: Lewis the cartographer, Clark the experimentalist and investigator, Gass the landscape impressionist, and Ordway the supplementary chronicler whose entries fill silences the captains’ divided itineraries necessarily produced.
