The expedition was divided on 30 July 1806, with Lewis and Ordway descending one watercourse and Clark navigating shoals on another as the parties moved toward their planned reunion. Three journals survive from the date, and read together they expose how sharply the narrators differ in what counts as a day worth recording.
Three Registers of the Same Storm
Rain dominates all three accounts, but each writer absorbs it differently. Ordway dispatches the weather in four words — rained all day
— and devotes the rest of his entry to a tally of game. His sentence structure is additive and almost ledger-like:
our hunters killed 2 buffaloe I and willard killed a white bear. Some of the hunters killed 4 Ibex and 2 beavers, rained all day. Camped on an Island.
Lewis, traveling with Ordway’s party, registers the same kills but transforms them into a scientific procurement record. Where Ordway writes I and willard killed a white bear,
Lewis specifies the same animal as a female brown bear with tallons 61/4 inches in length,
noting that he preserved the skin of this bear also with the tallons; it was not large and in but low order.
Ordway’s 4 Ibex
become, in Lewis’s hand, bighorns pursued deliberately: the captain halted several times in the course of the day to kill some bighorns being anxious to procure a few more skins and skeletons of this animal.
The two men describe identical events; only Lewis frames them as specimen collection for the expedition’s natural-history mission.
Lewis also closes with a phrase that, set beside Clark’s entry, becomes almost ironic: nothing extraordinary happened today.
Clark Alone at the Shoals
Clark, descending separately, has a far more eventful day, and his prose swells accordingly. He encounters what he names Buffalow Sholes and judges them in superlative terms:
This is by far the wost place which I have Seen on this river from the Rocky mountains to this place a distance of 694 miles by water.
The detail here is the detail of a working pilot. Clark notes the channel on the Stard Side near a high bluff,
a drop of about 3 feet,
and the necessity to let the Canoes down by hand for fear of their Strikeing a rock under water and Splitting.
He measures cliffs at about 100 feet in hight,
identifies the bedrock as hard and gritty of a dark brown Colour,
and registers the first appearance of Birnt hills which I have Seen on this river.
None of this geological observation appears in Lewis or Ordway, because neither was there — but the contrast also reflects Clark’s habitual attentiveness to navigability and landform.
Clark’s toponymy on this date is unusually dense. He names Buffalow Sholes after a buffalo standing in them, Bear rapid from the Circumstance of a bears being on a rock in the Middle of this rapid when I arived at it,
and a nearly dry watercourse Yorks dry R.
after his enslaved manservant — one of the rare commemorative namings Clark bestowed on York. The pattern is opportunistic: Clark names features for whatever animal or person occupies them at the moment of passage.
What Each Narrator Notices
The cross-narrator pattern is consistent with the broader journals. Ordway functions as a compressed sergeant’s log, useful chiefly for confirming that an event occurred and roughly tallying the hunt. Lewis converts shared events into taxonomic and measurable data, recording tallon length to the quarter inch and the body condition of the bear. Clark, when separated from Lewis, expands into the role the captains otherwise share: he becomes the geographer, hydrographer, and namer, attentive to channel width (from 3 to 400 yards wide
), to the muddy discharge of ephemeral creeks that Contributes much to the muddiness of the river,
and to the mechanics of lining canoes through dangerous water.
Notably, no narrator copies another on this date — the parties are physically separated, and the entries share no phrasing. The day thus offers a clean comparison of each writer’s instinctive priorities when describing wholly different scenes under the same date heading: Ordway counts, Lewis classifies, Clark charts.
