The entries for June 16, 1806 capture the Corps of Discovery at a moment of real apprehension: pushing east up the Lolo trail toward the Bitterroot crest, the party encountered snowbanks so deep that the road itself had vanished. Four narrators — Lewis, Clark, Ordway, and Gass — recorded the day, and their accounts laid side by side reveal both the texture of the climb and the editorial relationships among the journalists.
The Captains in Lockstep
Lewis and Clark’s entries are very nearly the same document. Clark writes that the snow lay “in emince masses in Some places 8 or ten feet deep,” while Lewis records it “in immence masses in some places 8 or ten feet deep.” The shared assessment of prospects is identical in substance and almost identical in wording. Lewis frames it:
vegetation is proportionably backward; the dogtooth violet is just in blume, the honeysuckle, huckburry and a small speceis of white maple are begining to put fourth their leaves; these appearances in this comparatively low region augers but unfavourably with rispect to the practibility of passing the mountains, however we determined to proceed
Clark’s version differs only in spelling (“Vigitation,” “propotionable,” “practibility”). The phytological inventory — dogtooth violet, honeysuckle, huckleberry, small white maple — appears in the same order in both journals, as does the conclusion that the low-country bloom “augers but unfavourably” for the crossing. This is one of the clearest examples in the 1806 record of the captains drafting together or copying from a common field note, with Clark’s orthography marking him as the second hand rather than the originator. Even shared incidental details — “this morning Windsor busted his rifle near the muzzle” — appear in both, again with only spelling variation (“bursted”/”busted”).
The Sergeants’ Independent Eyes
Ordway and Gass, by contrast, write independently of the captains and of each other, though they cover the same ground. Gass, characteristically terse, gives the day in plain measurements:
In the afternoon we found the snow banks more numerous, extensive and deep: in some of them the snow was as much as eight feet deep.
Ordway, who tends to speculate where Gass reports, pushes further. Where the captains note the depth of the present snow, Ordway alone reasons backward to the winter accumulation:
the bushes are all bent flat down by the deep Snow lying on them, the Snow must fall in these hollars in the winter 15 or 20 feet deep and perhaps the Snow drifts in and fills the hollers full.
This is an inference no other narrator ventures, and it shows Ordway’s habit of extrapolating from physical evidence — bent shrubs — to seasonal cause. Gass records the bearing capacity of the snow (“these banks are so closely packed and condensed, that they carry our horses”) in language that parallels Ordway’s “high banks of Snow which bore up our horses,” but neither sergeant appears to be copying the other; the convergence likely reflects shared conversation around the noon halt.
What Each Narrator Notices Alone
Several details survive in only one journal. Gass alone explicitly identifies the destination as the place “where Capt. Clarke killed a horse last fall and left it for the party” — a detail Ordway echoes but Lewis and Clark phrase more obliquely as “the place that Capt. C. had killed and left the flesh of a horse for us last September.” Lewis alone offers the botanical-geographic note that “the long leafed pine extends a little distance on this side of the main branch of Collins’s creek, and the white cedar not further than the branch of hungry creek on which we dined” — Clark reproduces the pine observation but drops the cedar. Lewis also claims the small brown pheasant (“I killed a small brown pheasant today”); Clark, writing in parallel, attributes the same kill to his co-captain (“Capt. L. killed a Small brown pheasant today”), a useful internal confirmation that Clark’s entry was composed with Lewis’s draft in front of him.
Clark uniquely records the morning’s flowers in bloom — “the Cullumbine the blue bells and the Yellow flowering pea” — and the angelica passage that Lewis’s surviving text breaks off before reaching. Whether Lewis wrote a parallel angelica note that has been lost, or whether Clark expanded independently here, is one of the small textual puzzles the day’s entries leave open. What is unambiguous is the pattern: on June 16, Lewis and Clark produced what amounts to a single co-authored entry in two hands, while Gass and Ordway preserved the day in voices that owe nothing to the captains’ shared draft.
