The entries of June 30, 1806, capture the Corps of Discovery arriving at Travelers’ Rest on Lolo Creek, the staging ground from which Lewis would strike north toward the Marias and Clark south to the Yellowstone. Four narrators—Lewis, Clark, Ordway, and Gass—record substantially the same march, but their accounts diverge in detail, register, and editorial sensibility in ways that illuminate how the expedition’s documentary record was actually produced.
The Captains in Parallel
Lewis and Clark’s entries for this date are nearly identical in structure and phrasing, a pattern long recognized by editors of the journals. Compare Clark’s opening:
We dispatched Drewyer & Jo. Field early this morning ahead to hunt. just as we had prepard. to set out at an early hour, a deer Came in to lick at the Springs and one of our hunters killed it; this Secired to us our dinner.
With Lewis’s:
We dispatched Drewyer and J. Fields early this morning to hunt on the road and indeavour to obtain some meat for us. just as we had prepared to set out at an early hour a deer came in to lick at these springs and one of our hunters killed it; this secured us our dinners.
The shared phrasing—”just as we had prepared to set out,” “this secured us our dinner”—indicates that one captain copied from the other, with Clark almost certainly working from Lewis’s draft (Clark’s spelling “Secired” suggests rapid transcription). Yet Clark adds material entirely his own: a retrospective summary of the mountain crossing that begins, “Descended the mountain to Travellers rest leaveing those tremendious mountanes behind us—in passing of which we have experiensed Cold and hunger of which I shall ever remember.” This is one of Clark’s rare moments of explicit emotional reckoning, and it appears nowhere in Lewis’s parallel entry.
Lewis, by contrast, devotes paragraph space to material Clark omits entirely: a narrow escape when his horse slipped on a steep hillside (“I also fell off backwards and slid near 40 feet down the hill before I could stop myself”), a naturalist’s note on a grey squirrel “much like those of the Pacific coast only that the belly of this was white,” and a description of the lady’s slipper in bloom, “the corolla is white, marked with small veigns of pale red longitudinally on the inner side.” The division of labor is characteristic: Clark handles the geography and historical summary, Lewis the personal incident and natural history.
The Sergeants’ Different Economies
John Ordway’s entry compresses the day into the brisk, practical idiom of an enlisted observer. Where the captains write “dispatched,” Ordway writes “as usal R. Fields killed a deer.” He notes the road conditions tersely—”a muddy bad road down the creek & over bad hills”—and closes with the detail neither captain mentions: “the Musquetoes verry troublesome here.” Ordway also specifies that the camp will hold “2 or 3 days to refresh our horses and kill Some meat,” framing the halt in logistical rather than strategic terms; the captains’ “final arrangements for seperation” do not appear in his account.
Patrick Gass’s entry, by contrast, reads as the most literary of the four—unsurprisingly, since Gass’s journal reached print in 1807 through the editorial hand of David McKeehan. Gass smooths the prose into rounded sentences and supplies geographic context the field journals lack:
Travellers’ rest creek, where the party rested two days last fall, and where it empties into Flathead (called Clarke’s) river a beautiful river about one hundred yards wide at this place; but there is no fish of any consequence in it; and according to the Indian account, there are falls on it, between this place and its mouth, where it empties into the Columbia, six or seven hundred feet high.
This passage—with its parenthetical naming, its measured river width, its citation of “Indian account,” and its speculative explanation of fish absence—has the cadence of a published travel narrative. Neither Lewis nor Clark mentions the rumored falls; Ordway is silent on river geography altogether. Whether the detail originated with Gass in the field or was elaborated in subsequent editing is impossible to determine from the entry alone.
Shared Anxieties, Shared Silences
Lewis and Clark both record concern for the Ootslashshoots (Salish), noting that “the indians express much concern for them and apprehend that the Minnetares of fort de Prarie have distroyed them,” and citing the “bearfoot Indians” tracks observed the previous day as evidence. This passage—politically and ethnographically significant—appears in neither sergeant’s journal. Ordway and Gass record the deer hunted and the miles traveled; the captains record the geopolitics of the upper Columbia. The day’s documentation thus stratifies neatly: hunting tally and weather for the sergeants, intertribal intelligence and natural history for the captains, and—uniquely in Clark—a backward glance at the snows and starvation of the Bitterroots that the Corps would never quite leave behind.
