By July 9, 1806, the Corps of Discovery had divided into multiple parties to explore the country between the Continental Divide and the Missouri’s Great Falls. The four surviving journals from this date — kept by Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway — capture the expedition operating on two separate rivers under a single cold summer rainstorm. Read together, they show how narrators at different points along the chain of command emphasized strikingly different details.
One Storm, Two Camps
Lewis and Gass were traveling together overland with a small advance party when the weather turned. Lewis records the morning with his characteristic precision, noting bearings and distances:
Set out early and had not proceeded far before it began to rain. the air extreemly cold. halted a few minutes in some old lodges until it cased to rain in some measure. we then proceeded and it rained without intermission wet us to the skin.
Gass, traveling in the same party, gives a nearly identical sequence — departure, rain, shelter in old Indian lodges, resumption of the march, more rain — but flattens Lewis’s surveyor’s detail into plainer narrative:
go down the river; but had not proceeded far until it began to rain, and we halted at some old Indian lodges, where we took shelter. In an hour’s time the rain slackened, and we proceeded on; but had not gone far before it began to rain again, and the weather was very cold for the season.
The parallel structure suggests Gass was working from shared experience rather than copying Lewis’s manuscript: he reports the same events but uses none of Lewis’s surveying language and offers his own time estimate (“In an hour’s time”). Where Lewis logs courses of “N. 80° E. 4 ms.” through cottonwood bottoms, Gass simply records that they encamped and “lay by during the afternoon.” Both note Joseph Field’s buffalo — Lewis calls it “a very fat buffaloe bull” and reports they “feasted,” while Gass writes that the men “dressed it, and brought in the best of the meat which was very good.” The register difference is consistent across the expedition: Lewis the naturalist-officer, Gass the working sergeant.
Clark’s Camp at the Canoe Deposit
Many miles away, Clark was occupied with logistics at the canoe cache where the party had wintered their dugouts the previous summer. His entry is dense with administrative concerns: raising and drying canoes, apportioning loads, organizing the detachment that would accompany him to the Yellowstone (the “river Rejhone”). He also records a small mystery and a small disappointment:
Set Several men to work digging for the Tobacco Capt. Lewis informed me he had buried in the place the lodge Stood when we lay here last Summer, they Serched diligently without finding anything.
Ordway, writing from the same camp, supplies a detail Clark omits — that “some tin and nails had been taken of[f] them by the Savages,” referring to Indian visitors who had pilfered metal from the cached canoes. Ordway also confirms Clark’s organizational planning from the enlisted man’s perspective, naming his own assignment: “I go down with 9 more to take the canoes to the falls of the Missourie then to the forks of Marriah where I expect to join Capt Lewis & his party.” Where Clark issues the orders, Ordway records receiving them.
What Each Narrator Notices
The day’s most distinctive ethnobotanical observation appears only in Clark’s journal. Sacagawea — “The Squar” — brought him a root resembling a carrot:
this root most resembles a Carrot in form and Size and Something of its colour, being of a pailer yellow than that of our Carrot, the Stem and leaf is much like the Common Carrot, and the taste not unlike. it is a native of moist land.
Neither Ordway nor any other narrator at the canoe camp records this exchange, a reminder that Clark’s role as expedition cartographer and observer often produced unique entries even when he shared a camp with other diarists. Conversely, Ordway’s note about pilfered nails and Gass’s blunt comment that the weather was “very cold for the season” preserve details Lewis and Clark let pass.
Taken together, the four entries for July 9, 1806 demonstrate how the divided expedition generated complementary records: Lewis the surveyor, Gass the soldier, Clark the administrator-naturalist, and Ordway the dutiful sergeant — four pens documenting one rainy Wednesday on the upper Missouri drainage.
