April 29, 1805 marked a doubly significant day in the natural history record of the Lewis and Clark Expedition: the party’s first kill of a grizzly bear and their first sustained observation of bighorn mountain sheep. Two sergeants — Patrick Gass and John Ordway — kept journals that day, and a comparison of their entries shows how differently two literate enlisted men could process the same sequence of events.
The Bighorn Encounter: Compression Versus Detail
Gass dispatches the mountain sheep sighting in two sentences. He notes that the animals stood atop the highest bluff, that the natives describe them as common in the Rocky Mountains, and that an attempt to kill one failed. His entry is functional, almost a tally:
on the top of the highest we saw some Mountain sheep, which the natives say are common about the Rocky mountains. These were the first we had seen and we attempted to kill some of them but did not succeed.
Ordway, by contrast, devotes a substantial paragraph to the same incident. He records that the ewe had a lamb with her, traces the route the animals took down the bluff (“they took down the bluffs and ran along whare it was nearly Steep where there was a black Stripe in the bluffs”), notes the failed shot was taken “at too Great a distance,” and offers a comparative description for readers who had never seen the animal:
the coulour of the Sheep was white had large crooked horns, & resembled our tame Sheep only much larger Size & horns… these Sheep are verry wild, and keep mostly in these bare hills or mountains
Ordway’s instinct as a journalist is to translate the unfamiliar into terms his eventual readers might recognize — domestic sheep, only larger and wilder. Gass shows no such impulse here.
The Grizzly: A Question of Color
On the bear, however, both sergeants converge on the same problem of nomenclature. Gass writes:
Captain Lewis, and one of the men, travelled some distance by land and killed a white bear.— The natives call them white, but they are more of a brown grey. They are longer than the common black bear, and have much larger feet and talons.
Ordway records the same naming puzzle in nearly identical terms:
had killed a Whiteish bair what is called the white bair, but is not White but light coullour
The parallel phrasing — “call them white, but…” in Gass; “called the white bair, but…” in Ordway — suggests both men were repeating a formulation that had circulated through camp, almost certainly originating with the captains. Lewis and Clark themselves usually called the grizzly “white,” though, as the editorial note appended to Ordway’s journal observes, they had earlier described it as “brown or yellow.” The sergeants are working out, in real time and in their own idioms, a vocabulary that the scientific record would not settle for decades.
Gass adds a comparative anatomical note that Ordway omits: the grizzly is “longer than the common black bear, and have much larger feet and talons.” Ordway, who elsewhere remarked on the four-and-three-eighths-inch claws, leaves the morphological detail for another entry and focuses here on the logistics — Lewis and the hunter rejoined the boats around half past nine, and the party delayed until half past ten “to git the meat on board.”
What Each Narrator Sees
Beyond the bear and the sheep, Ordway’s entry is crowded with observations Gass does not mention at all: a stray bay horse standing in a plain of wild hops, suggesting nearby Indians; flocks of “Cabberree or antilopes”; buffalo and elk; red cedar in the gullies; bluffs of red earth “resembling Spanish brown.” Ordway names the small river at the evening’s camp “little yallow River” — a detail Gass records only as “a small river, which comes in on the North side about 70 yards wide.”
The two journals agree exactly on the day’s distance: twenty-five miles. They agree on the camp’s location at the mouth of an unnamed tributary on the north bank. But where Gass produces a clean military summary, Ordway produces something closer to a field naturalist’s notebook — wild hops, stray horses, the color of the soil, the behavior of bighorn ewes with lambs. Read together, the two entries demonstrate why the expedition’s redundant journal-keeping policy mattered: each sergeant preserved details the other let pass.
