The descent from the Lolo Trail on June 29, 1806 marked the end of one of the expedition’s most feared passages. All four journalists present — Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway — recorded the day’s march from the snowy ridges down to the warm springs at the base of Travelers Rest Creek (modern Lolo Creek). Read together, the four entries demonstrate the layered authorship of the expedition’s written record: the captains composing nearly verbatim parallel narratives, the sergeants producing independent observations of varying density.
Parallel Pens: Lewis and Clark in Lockstep
Lewis and Clark’s entries for this day are so close in wording that they must have been composed in consultation, or one copied directly from the other. Lewis writes that the party
pursued the hights of the ridge on which we have been passing for several days; it terminated at the distance of 5 ms. from our encampment and we decended to, and passed the main branch of the Kooskooske 1½ ms. above the entrance of Quawmash creek
Clark renders the same sentence almost identically, substituting only “Glade Creek” for Lewis’s “Quawmash creek” — a revealing slip that shows the captains had not yet standardized place-names even within a single day’s writing. Both men describe the deer found near the river as a “fortunate Supply as all our bears oil was now exhosted, and we were reduced to our roots alone without Salt.” The shared phrasing extends through the geological description of the springs, which both call a “grey freestone rock” rising in “iregular masy clifts in a circular range.”
One small but telling divergence: Lewis records bathing for “19 minutes,” while Clark says he “remained in 10 minits.” Whether this records two separate baths or a transcription error, it is among the few independent details in otherwise twinned prose.
Ordway’s Working Log
John Ordway’s entry, by contrast, reads as the diary of a man with hands still cold from the morning fog. He notes details the captains omit: that “the fog rose up thick from the hollars,” that Shields “killed 2 crains,” and that the bath water “so hot that it makes the Skin Smart when I first entered it.” Ordway also confirms a personal tasting the captains do not mention: “I drank Some of the water also.”
Ordway is the only journalist to specify that the lost horses returned with “one deer” killed by the searchers, framing the episode in the practical terms of a sergeant tracking the day’s meat supply. His geographic notes — that they “Crossed glade Creek Several times” and reached “the head waters of fcravvellers rest Creek” — show him reasoning his way back along the route first traveled the previous September.
Gass’s Compression
Patrick Gass, whose journal had already been edited for eventual publication, produces the briefest account. He compresses the day’s weather into a single sentence:
there was a shower of rain, with hail, thunder and lightning, that lasted about an hour.
Where Lewis devotes a paragraph to the geology and temperature of the springs, Gass dispatches the matter in a clause: “we encamped for the night, and most of us bathed in its water.” He records the same hunting successes — a deer at the glades, another on the way — but omits the lost horses and the search by Colter and Joseph Field, an episode central to both captains’ and Ordway’s accounts.
The pattern across the four entries is consistent with what scholars have observed throughout 1806: the captains share a composing process that produces near-duplicate prose; Ordway writes independently and often catches sensory details (the fog, the smarting skin, the taste of the water) that the captains pass over; Gass — or his later editor David McKeehan — strips the day to its narrative bones. Together the entries record not only the crossing of the mountains but the social structure of the expedition’s literacy, with each rank producing a different kind of document.
The shared note of relief, however, crosses every register. Whether in Lewis’s careful “we bid adieu to the snow” or Gass’s plain “At 10 o’clock we left the snow,” all four men mark the same threshold — and all four, captains and enlisted alike, climbed into the same steaming pool at the end of it.
