The journals of June 24, 1806 capture a single logistical event — the reuniting of a forward detachment under Sergeant Gass with the main party under Lewis and Clark, accompanied by three Nez Perce guides — but they capture it from four distinct vantage points. Read together, the entries by Patrick Gass, John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis form an unusually clear case study in how the expedition’s record was layered: a captain’s near-duplication, an enlisted man’s compressed itinerary, and a sergeant’s view from the advance camp looking backward toward the column.
Lewis and Clark: Near-Verbatim Parallel Texts
The captains’ entries for this date are, as on many days of the return journey, almost identical in wording. Clark writes:
We collected our horses early this morning and Set out accompanied by our 3 guides. Colter joined us this morning haveing killed a Bear, which from his discription of it’s poverty and distance we did not think proper to send after.
Lewis records the same passage with only orthographic variation (“accompanyed,” “description”):
We collected our horses early this morning and set out accompanyed by our three guides. Colter joined us this morning having killed a bear, which from his discription of it’s poverty and distance we did not think proper to send after.
The pattern of shared phrasing — “nooned it as usual at Collins’s Creek where we found Frazier, solus” appears in both — confirms what scholars have long observed about the homeward leg: one captain was copying from the other, or both were drawing on a common field note. The differences are almost entirely at the level of spelling (Clark’s “Sargt. Gass” versus Lewis’s “Sergt. Gass”; Clark’s “Jos. & R. Field” versus Lewis’s “R. & J. Feilds”) and minor reference (Clark lists four prior camp dates at Fish Creek — “the 15th 18th 19th & 20th inst.” — while Lewis names only “the 19th & 20th”). Clark’s broader date range may indicate access to a fuller log, or simply a more inclusive memory of the detachment’s earlier movements.
Ordway’s Compression and Gass’s Forward View
John Ordway, writing as a sergeant traveling with the captains’ party, produces a much shorter entry that strips the day to its skeleton: departure, the three guides, the advance of two Indians and four men, dinner, and arrival at a small prairie. He notes a detail the captains fold differently into their accounts:
the men who Stayed with the Indians had killed one deer.
Lewis and Clark record the same kill but immediately moralize it — the Field brothers “had been liberal to the indians insomuch that they had no provision.” Ordway reports the fact; the captains report the consequence.
Patrick Gass, by contrast, was not with the captains at all on the morning of June 24. His entry is written from the forward camp where he, Wiser, and the two Nez Perce men had been waiting. His perspective is therefore the inverse of the captains’: he is looking backward down the trail, wondering whether the main party will arrive. He records details no one else preserves — a gift of footwear to maintain Indian goodwill, the torment of insects on the horses, and a contingency plan should the column fail to appear:
One of our hunters went out, but had no success. The day keeps cloudy, and the mus-quitoes are very troublesome. There is also a small black fly in this country, that so torments our horses, that they can get no rest, but when we make small fires to keep them off.
Gass alone documents the smudge fires kindled to protect the horses, and Gass alone preserves the diplomatic transaction of the moccasins given to persuade the two Nez Perce to wait. His entry closes where the captains’ entries close — “the party arrived with three more Indians, and we all encamped together for the night” — but the convergence is reached from the opposite direction.
Patterns in the Record
Three observations emerge from juxtaposing the four entries. First, the Lewis–Clark parallelism on this date is so close that the texts function as one source rather than two; the meaningful redundancy is between the captains and the enlisted journalists. Second, Ordway’s terse log and Gass’s expansive sensory account complement rather than duplicate each other — Ordway tracks movement, Gass tracks conditions. Third, only Gass registers the environmental cost of the crossing (mosquitoes, black flies, sleepless horses), a reminder that the captains’ command-level prose tends to omit the bodily texture of the day. The reunion at Fish Creek is, in the captains’ telling, an administrative success; in Gass’s, it is the end of an uncomfortable wait beside smoldering fires.
