The expedition’s June 25, 1806 entries offer a striking case study in how four men sharing the same camp produced four very different records. Patrick Gass, John Ordway, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark all describe the same march from their Bitterroot encampment to Hungry Creek, the same midday rendezvous with the Field brothers, and the same recovery of the horses lost on the outbound crossing. Yet the texture and length of each account vary so dramatically that a reader unfamiliar with the expedition’s authorial hierarchy might not recognize them as accounts of a single day.
The Spectacle the Sergeants Missed
The most arresting image of the day appears only in the captains’ journals. Lewis writes that the previous evening the Nez Perce guides "entertained us with seting the fir trees on fire," explaining that the dry limbs near the trunks "creates a very suddon and immence blaze from bottom to top of those tall trees." He frames the spectacle aesthetically:
they are a beatifull object in this situation at night. this exhibition reminded me of a display of fireworks. the natives told us that their object in seting those trees on fire was to bring fair weather for our journey.
Clark’s entry reproduces this passage almost verbatim, with only minor orthographic variants — "eminence blaize" for Lewis’s "immence blaze," "boutifull" for "beatifull," "remide" for "reminded." The textual dependence is unmistakable, confirming the well-documented pattern in which Clark copied substantial portions of Lewis’s journal during the return journey, sometimes preserving the captain’s phrasing down to the clause structure.
Gass and Ordway, by contrast, omit the burning trees entirely. Gass records only that "We proceeded forward early," that two men and an Indian were sent for the horses, and that "a considerable quantity of rain had fallen during the afternoon." Ordway notes that the party "came to an open place or small prarie" and observes that "the Snow has melted considerable since we passd" — a practical traveler’s detail neither captain bothers to record. Whether the sergeants slept through the fire ceremony, considered it unremarkable, or simply lacked the literary inclination to describe it, their silence is telling.
Botany, Ethnography, and a Disputed Detail
The captains also devote a long passage to a small tuberous plant encountered at the dinner halt — "a small knob root a good deel in flavor an consistency like the Jerusalem Artichoke," with "two small oval smooth leaves placed opposite on either side of the peduncle." Lewis presents this as his own observation: "at this place I met with a plant the root of which the shoshones eat." Clark’s parallel sentence quietly reassigns the encounter: "at this place the squaw Collected a parcel of roots of which the Shoshones Eat." The reference is to Sacagawea, and Clark’s version restores her to a scene from which Lewis’s first-person framing had effectively erased her.
A similar small divergence concerns timing. Lewis recalls that Drouillard had taken a comparable collection of roots from the Shoshones "last summer on the head of Jefferson’s river," while Clark writes "last fall." Both men are recalling August 1805; Lewis is closer to correct, though neither phrasing is precise. These minor slips are useful reminders that even the captains’ polished entries were composed at some remove from the events described.
Register and Purpose
The four entries together illuminate the division of labor among expedition journalists. Gass’s account is the shortest and most utilitarian, organized around the day’s logistical milestones — departure, halt, dinner, encampment, weather. Ordway adds modest environmental notation, remarking on snowmelt and the lack of grass that forced an early camp: "we Camped eairly as their is no grass near a head." Lewis supplies aesthetic, ethnographic, and botanical layers; Clark, working alongside him, copies and lightly revises.
What emerges is not redundancy but a stratified record. The sergeants supply a skeleton of movement and weather; the captains supply ceremony, science, and sentiment. Only by reading all four together does June 25, 1806 — a day of recovered horses, burning firs, and a small Shoshone root — come into full view.
