The expedition was, on this date, divided. Captain William Clark was descending separately from Lewis’s party, both moving toward an eventual reunion on the lower Missouri. The day’s entries from Patrick Gass, John Ordway, Meriwether Lewis, and Clark therefore split into two narrative streams — three men writing from one camp, one writing alone — yet a comparison of the four reveals how differently each narrator weighted the events before him.
The Missing Canoe: Lewis, Ordway, and Gass Compared
Lewis, Ordway, and Gass all record the same problem: the small canoe carrying Colter and Collins had not caught up. The three accounts converge on the facts but diverge sharply in register and detail. Lewis, as commanding officer, frames the delay as a decision he must make:
Colter and Collins not having arrived induced me to remain this morning for them… I remained untill noon when I again reimbarked and set out concluding that as Colter and Collins had not arrived by that time that they had passed us after dark the night of the 3rd inst. as Sergt Ordway informed me he should have done last evening had not the centinel hailed him.
Lewis explicitly credits Ordway as the source of his reasoning — a rare instance of one journalist citing another within the day’s entry. Ordway’s own account corroborates the exchange but compresses it: “as we are not certain but what Colter and Collins is a head So we Set out and procd on.” Gass, writing at a further remove from command decisions, presents the same conclusion in the passive third person: “we began to suspect it had passed in the night.” The chain of inference travels from sentinel to sergeant to captain to carpenter, and the four texts together let a reader reconstruct it.
Gass, notably, places the floating canoe episode at the opening of his entry — “About midnight the small canoe we left yesterday came floating down with the current, and would have passed us if our centinel had not hailed it” — a detail Lewis only alludes to obliquely and Ordway omits entirely from this day’s record. Gass also alone notes that the recovered canoe’s hunters “killed a bear and two deer.”
The Storm: A Test of Observational Priorities
That evening’s thunder squall illustrates how register shapes what survives in each journal. Gass gives a tidy meteorological summary:
at dark a violent gust of wind and rain came on with thunder and lightning, which lasted about an hour; after which we had a fine clear night.
Ordway, whose canoe was nearly swamped, writes from inside the event:
came up a hard Thunder Shower of wind and rain and nearly filled our canoes, So that we had to unload them, the Sand flew So that we could Scarsely see & cut our faces by the force of the wind.
Lewis omits the storm entirely from his August 5 entry, devoting his evening paragraph instead to natural-history observation — a nine-foot bear killed by the Field brothers, the molting condition of the geese, and an earlier-noted pelican in the same flightless state. The contrast is characteristic: where Ordway reports embodied hardship, Lewis turns toward systematic description of fauna.
Clark Alone: Mosquitoes and a Fat She-Bear
Clark’s entry, written from a separate camp downstream, shares almost no content with the other three. His preoccupation is mosquitoes. He opens with the men’s sleeplessness, notes that his “Musquetor Bear” — his netting — “has a number of Small holes worn through they pass in,” and reports missing a bighorn ram because “the Misquetors was So noumerous that I could not keep them off my gun long enough to take Sight.” Only when a northwest breeze rose at 10 a.m. did the insects thin.
Clark’s day ends with a hunt that has no parallel in the other journals: a white bear killed in the river and towed across to the south bank. He pronounces her “much the fattest animale we have killed on the rout” — a superlative that invites comparison with Lewis’s nine-foot bear noted the same evening on a different stretch of river. Two bear killings, two journals, two captains: the parallel is accidental but telling.
Read together, the four entries form a composite the editorial tradition has tended to flatten. Gass supplies narrative shape, Ordway supplies the sensory texture of hardship, Lewis supplies command logic and natural history, and Clark — writing alone — supplies the reminder that the expedition on this date was not one party but two.
