September 20, 1805, found the main party of the Corps of Discovery strung out along a high ridge in the Bitterroot Mountains, days into the most punishing passage of their westward journey. Two of the expedition’s sergeants — Patrick Gass and John Ordway — kept journals that day, and read side by side they reveal not only the physical ordeal of the crossing but the distinct sensibilities of two enlisted chroniclers working under identical conditions.
Parallel Ordeals, Divergent Emphases
Both men describe a day of cold, hunger, and missing horses. Gass opens with logistical accounting:
All our horses except one was collected early: Six hunters went on ahead; one man to look for the horse; and all the rest of us proceeded on our journey over the mountains, which are very high and rough.
His prose has the cadence of a duty roster — hunters dispatched, a man detached to search, the remainder marching on. Ordway, by contrast, opens inside the body:
handful or 2 of Indian peas and a little bears oil which we brought with us we finished the last morcil of it and proceeded on half Starved and very weak, our horses feet gitting Sore.
Where Gass measures the day in distances and timestamps — "About 12 we passed," "At 3 we came to snow again," "encamped after travelling 18 miles" — Ordway measures it in privation. Gass logs eighteen miles; Ordway logs fourteen. The discrepancy is itself revealing: the sergeants were likely traveling together, but each man’s reckoning of distance on a trail without landmarks reflects guesswork as much as observation.
The Cached Horse Meat: A Shared Moment, Differently Told
The most striking convergence between the two journals is the discovery of meat left behind by Captain Clark’s advance party. Ordway records the find with palpable relief:
came a Short distance and found a line which Capt Clark had left with the meat of a horse which they found in the woods and killed for our use as they had killed nothing but 1 or 2 pheasants after they left us. we took the meat and proceeded on.
Gass omits this episode entirely from the entry as preserved here, mentioning instead that the party halted to make soup "with snow water, as no other could be found." The contrast suggests something about each man’s editorial instincts. Ordway preserves the human chain of provisioning — Clark’s note, the killed horse, the sergeant’s gratitude — while Gass abstracts the day into terrain and timber:
the country is closely timbered with pitch and spruce pine, and what some call balsam-fir.
Gass, who would later publish the first journal of the expedition (1807), already writes with a reader in mind, offering generalizations about forest cover that Ordway does not bother with.
Lost Horses and Lost Cargo
Both narrators note a missing horse, but only Ordway specifies the stakes:
one horse Strayed from us yesterday with a pair of port Mantons [portmanteaus] with Some Marchandize and Capt Lewises winter cloths & C. 2 men went back to hunt for him.
This is precisely the sort of operational detail Gass tends to suppress in favor of narrative momentum. Gass mentions only that "the man, who had been sent for the horse came up, but had not found him" — a single sentence where Ordway gives an inventory of loss that includes Lewis’s winter clothing, a serious matter with the season turning.
Ordway also records a small, vivid misery absent from Gass:
our horses got stung by the wasps.
Such details — wasps, sore hooves, the last morsel of bear’s oil — mark Ordway as the more embodied observer of the two on this day, while Gass keeps his eye on the horizon: "We can see no prospect of getting off these desert mountains yet, except the appearance of a deep cove on each side of the ridge."
Context: The Prairie Beyond
Neither sergeant yet knew that Clark’s advance party — whose horse meat had sustained them — had already broken out of the mountains onto the Weippe Prairie and made contact with the Nez Perce. The editorial footnote appended to Ordway’s published journal preserves Gass’s later recollection of the moment of emergence: that the joy among the corps resembled "passengers at sea, who have experienced a dangerous and protracted voyage, when they first discover land." That relief was still days away for the men eating Clark’s cached horse on the ridge above Hungry Creek. On September 20, the two sergeants recorded only mountains, snow water, and the lengthening list of things gone missing.
