The journal entries of July 31, 1806, present an unusual situation for cross-narrator analysis: the Corps of Discovery remained divided, with Lewis, Gass, and Ordway descending one watercourse together while Clark moved separately down the Yellowstone toward the planned reunion. The result is two parallel narratives sharing a date but not a landscape, allowing readers to see both how three men describe the same hunt and how Clark, alone with his own party, constructs an entirely independent record.
The Elk Hunt: Three Voices, One Event
Lewis, Gass, and Ordway all record the killing of fifteen elk from a herd encountered around nine or ten in the morning, but each narrator frames the event according to his characteristic register. Lewis offers the most economical account, noting that the party “fell in with a large herd of Elk of which we killed 15 and took their skins.” Gass, writing in his more public-facing prose, expands the scene:
about 10 o’clock we saw a great gang of elk on a small island, where we halted and in a short time killed fifteen of them. We took the skins and the best parts of the meat, and proceeded.
Ordway alone supplies the practical motive that Lewis and Gass leave implicit. Where Lewis records simply that the men “took their skins,” Ordway clarifies that the elk were killed “mearly for the hides to cover our canoes” — a detail that transforms the hunt from opportunism into provisioning for the boats that would carry the party downriver. Ordway also names a specific hunter, crediting “J° Fields” with killing an Ibex (the bighorn that Lewis calls a bighorn and Gass calls a “large horned animal or mountain sheep”). The vocabulary divergence on this single species — ibex, bighorn, mountain sheep — is typical of the expedition’s ongoing struggle to fit Rocky Mountain fauna into Old World naming conventions.
The three accounts also differ in their tallies of secondary game. Gass reports “two mules and twelve other deer, and two beaver”; Ordway records “14 deer and one beaver”; Lewis writes “14 deer” and “1 beaver.” Gass’s count of fourteen deer plus two mule deer suggests he is distinguishing species where Lewis and Ordway lump them together — a small but consistent pattern in Gass’s natural-history attentiveness.
Clark Alone: Buffalo, Coal, and a White Bear
Clark’s entry, written from his separate camp on the Yellowstone, has no overlap with the others except the shared rain. His day opens with a vivid nocturnal disturbance:
I was much disturbed last night by the noise of the buffalow which were about me. one gang Swam the river near our Camp which alarmed me a little for fear of their Crossing our Canoes and Splitting them to pieces.
Clark’s geographical eye remains his distinguishing feature. He names features as he passes — “wolf rapid,” the “Sa-a-shah” or Little Wolf River identified from Hidatsa testimony, and “oak-tar-pon-er or Coal River” — and describes the country with attention to its mineralogy: “various Coloured earth and Coal without much rock,” “Conical mounds which appear to have been burnt,” and “great quantities of Coal or carbonated wood” visible in every bluff. None of the other narrators that day produce comparable topographic detail; Lewis confines himself to noting “high pine hills” and bottoms that “became wider better timbered.”
Clark’s most dramatic passage is his encounter with the largest white bear he has ever seen, feeding on a buffalo carcass on a sandbar. Four shots fail to bring the animal down:
I landed and fired 2 more Shot into this tremendious animal without killing him. night comeing on we Could not pursue him he bled profusely.
The episode encapsulates the expedition’s repeated frustration with the grizzly’s resistance to small-caliber fire — a theme Lewis had developed at length in 1805 but which here belongs entirely to Clark.
Shelter and Inference
Lewis’s entry closes with an ethnographic observation that Ordway echoes in compressed form. Both note that the party camped at old Indian lodges; Ordway records simply “Camped at some old Indn lodges on N. Side,” while Lewis adds interpretive weight:
these lodges appeared to have been built in the course of the last winter. these lodges with the addition of some Elk skins afforded us a good shelter from the rain… I think it probable that the minnetares of Fort de Prarie visit this part of the river; we meet with their old lodges in every bottom.
The pattern is familiar: Ordway records the fact, Lewis supplies the inference. Gass, more concerned with mileage, closes instead with the day’s distance — “we came 70 miles to day” — a figure neither Lewis nor Ordway bothers to record. Across all four journals, the day demonstrates how the same expedition, even when fragmented across two rivers, generates a layered record in which each narrator’s habits of attention complement, rather than duplicate, the others.
