September 18, 1805 marks one of the most strategically pivotal days of the expedition’s mountain crossing. With the men reduced to eating colt meat and portable soup, the captains divided the party: William Clark would push ahead with six hunters to reach the plains and procure game, while Meriwether Lewis would shepherd the slower main body forward. The four surviving journal accounts — by Clark, Lewis, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway — illuminate not only the day’s events but the structural divide that now ran through the Corps itself.
Two Parties, Two Vantages
Clark’s entry, written from the advance party, is the only one that records the day’s most consequential geographic discovery. From a high point on the mountain he glimpses what the expedition has been seeking for weeks:
at 20 miles I had a view of an emence Plain and leavel Countrey to the S W. & West at a great distance a high mountain in advance beyond the Plain
This sighting — the end of the Bitterroots in view at last — appears in no other narrator’s entry for the 18th, because no other narrator was there to see it. Clark also names the camp’s stream with grim humor:
Encamped on a bold running Creek passing to the left which I call Hungery Creek as at that place we had nothing to eate.
The toponym, preserved on modern maps, originates in this single sentence.
Lewis, writing from the rear party, never mentions the plain. His concerns are logistical and immediate: a delayed start, a missing horse, dwindling rations. He explains the rationale for the split in language that reads almost like a memorandum:
there being no game in these mountains we concluded it would be better for one of us to take the hunters and hurry on to the leavel country a head and there hunt and provide some provision while the other remained with and brought on the party the latter of these was my part
Lewis names the negligent party member — Willard — and itemizes the remaining stores with quartermaster precision:
a few canesters of which, a little bears oil and about 20 lbs. of candles form our stock of provision
The detail about candles as emergency food is recorded by Lewis alone.
The Enlisted Perspective: Gass and Ordway
Sergeants Gass and Ordway both march with Lewis’s rear party, and their entries align closely on distance and hardship while diverging in register and detail. Gass, characteristically terse, foregrounds the weather and terrain in superlatives:
proceeded over the most terrible mountains I ever beheld
He alone quantifies the snowfall —
the snow fell about 10 inches deep
— and notes the visibility collapse to under 200 yards. Gass also reports the killing of another colt at the night’s camp, a detail Lewis omits, perhaps because Lewis’s men finished their last colt that morning while a separate animal was slaughtered later.
Ordway’s account tracks Lewis’s chronology more closely than Gass’s does. He confirms Clark’s sunrise departure with six hunters, the mid-afternoon halt to melt snow and prepare portable soup, and the difficult descent
down a Steep gulley to a run to water them
at the night’s camp. Ordway gives the day’s distance as 14 miles, where Lewis records 18; the discrepancy may reflect different measurement points or simply the imprecision of dead reckoning over broken terrain. Both men describe the camp as perched on a steep or “sidling” mountainside.
What Each Narrator Notices
The pattern across the four entries is instructive. Clark, alone at the front, alone sees the plain and alone names the creek. Lewis, responsible for the main body, alone catalogs provisions and assigns blame for the late start. Gass alone measures the snow. Ordway alone describes the watering of the horses down a gulley. None of the four narrators copies another for this date — a useful reminder that even when sergeants had access to the captains’ notes, their entries on days of physical separation tend toward independent observation.
Read together, the four accounts reconstruct a day that none reconstructs alone: a starving party split across miles of snow-choked ridge, with one captain glimpsing salvation on the western horizon while the other counted candles by the fire.
