The entries for July 10, 1806 record a single hinge day in the Corps of Discovery’s homeward journey, when the expedition was operating as two distinct detachments: Lewis pressing east toward the Great Falls, and Clark moving down the Jefferson River toward the Three Forks, where his command would split again for the Yellowstone (Rochejhone). Four journals — Lewis, Clark, Ordway, and Gass — survive for the date, and their juxtaposition exposes how each man framed terrain, weather, and risk in distinctively different registers.
A Cold Morning, Recorded Four Ways
All four narrators register the unseasonable cold, but with revealing differences of emphasis. Gass, writing from Lewis’s party near the Medicine River, opens with atmosphere and altitude:
This morning was clear and cold, and all the mountains in sight were covered with snow, which fell yesterday and last night.
His published narrative even appends a footnote reasoning that mid-summer snow should not surprise the reader given the elevation required to give the Missouri “so rapid a course… for upwards of 3000 miles.” This editorial gloss — almost certainly the work of Gass’s editor David McKeehan rather than Gass himself — is a reminder that Gass’s text reaches us mediated.
Clark, with the southern detachment on the Jefferson, offers the most precise instrumentation of the cold:
last night was very cold and this morning everything was white with frost and the grass Stiff frozend. I had Some water exposed in a bason in which the ice was 3/4 of an inch thick this morning.
Where Gass generalizes upward to the snowy peaks, Clark measures downward into a basin of ice. Ordway, characteristically terse, simply notes “cold this morning” before turning to the practical business of cutting up a worthless canoe “for paddles and fire wood.” Lewis, remarkably, does not mention the frost at all — his attention is fixed on mud, on prickly pear, and on game.
Two Parties, Two Landscapes
The geographic split between the journals is striking. Clark produces what amounts to a small geographical treatise on the Beaverhead Valley, even supplying the Shoshone name:
that butifull and extensive Vally open and fertile which we Call the beaver head Vally which is the Indian name in their language Har na Hap pap Chah. from the No. of those animals in it & a pt. of land resembling the head of one
He catalogues tributaries — McNeal’s Creek, Track Creek, Philanthropy, Wisdom, Field’s, and Frazier’s — and counts “15 big horn animals” on the rocks of Rattlesnake Mountain. This is Clark the cartographer at full stretch, sweeping the valley with a surveyor’s eye.
Lewis, by contrast, narrates a hunter’s day on the Medicine River. His prose is dense with incident: elk that scented the wind and ran off in the morning, then three elk killed in the evening when the wind shifted; a brown bear that swam the river and was killed by Drewyer; another “very large bear” that pursued Gass and Thompson across the plains. Lewis’s matter-of-fact note that the men “were affraid to fire on the bear least their horses should throw them as they were unaccustomed to the gun” is the kind of operational detail that none of the other narrators preserves.
Gass’s version of the same evening reduces it to a hunting tally — “our hunters killed five deer, two elk and a bear” — with no mention of his own near-encounter with the bear that chased him. The omission is characteristic: Gass’s published journal habitually compresses Lewis-party drama into bookkeeping.
Ordway and the Logistics of the Split
Ordway, traveling by canoe with Clark’s water detachment, supplies the logistical spine of the day that the captains’ more discursive entries blur. He records that Clark’s land party kept pace with the canoes, that Clark himself transferred to the boats because they were faster and easier on the horses, and that the combined party “Camped near the 3000 mile Island, having made 97 miles this day by water.” Clark confirms the same encampment — “the head of the 3000 Mile Island on which we had encamped on the 11th of Augt last” — and notes with satisfaction that “the Canoes passed Six of my encampments assending,” a small celebration of how rapidly the homeward current was unwinding the labor of the previous summer.
Read together, the four entries demonstrate the layered utility of the expedition’s redundant journal-keeping: Lewis for narrative incident, Clark for geography and ethnonymy, Ordway for distances and order of march, and Gass (through McKeehan) for the version that reached the early reading public. On July 10, 1806, no single narrator captures the day; the day exists in the overlap.
