The journals of July 21, 1806 capture the Corps of Discovery at its most geographically dispersed point. Captain Lewis is ascending a northern branch of the Marias River, hoping to extend the watershed of the Missouri as far north as possible. Captain Clark, hundreds of miles to the southeast on the Yellowstone, is trying to ready canoes while half his horses have gone missing. Three of the four narrators present — Gass, Ordway, and Clark — are with the Yellowstone party; only Lewis writes from the Marias. The result is an unusually layered record of one camp and a solitary record of the other.
Three Voices on the Same Lost Horses
The Yellowstone entries by Gass, Ordway, and Clark describe the same sequence of events — searches dispatched at daylight, returns at noon, further searches in the afternoon — but at very different registers. Gass, a sergeant whose published journal tends toward terse summary, gives the bare chronology:
Two more men went out to look for them, and at noon came back without finding them. In the afternoon some more men went to look for them, who at night returned also without seeing any thing of them.
Ordway, writing privately, adds the bodily texture Gass omits — the mosquitoes that "troubled us all last night," the smudge fires of buffalo dung kindled to drive off "the Musquetoes and Small flyes verry troublesome." Ordway also records a decision Gass does not mention: the party "concluded to delay tomorrow for our horses before we give them out [up]."
Clark, as commanding officer, names names and assigns geography to the search. He sent Shannon, Bratton, and Charbonneau in three different directions; Bratton and Charbonneau returned by 10 A.M., while Shannon ranged fourteen miles downriver before returning empty-handed late in the evening. Only Clark records what Shannon found in the course of that long ride:
Shannon informed me that he Saw a remarkable large Lodge about 12 miles below, covered with bushes and the top Deckorated with Skins &c and had the appearance of haveing been built about 2 years.
This ethnographic detail — almost certainly a reference to a ceremonial structure — passes entirely unrecorded by Gass and Ordway, a reminder that the enlisted journals on this date function as logbooks while Clark’s serves as field report.
Suspicion and the Smoke from the Southwest
Clark alone interprets the loss. Where Ordway frames the missing horses as a problem of patience ("before we give them out") and Gass simply notes the failure, Clark turns to causation:
I am apprehensive that the indians have Stolen our horses, and probably those who had made the Smoke a fiew days passed towards the S. W.
This sentence connects two days of observation into a single narrative of theft. It also explains why Clark immediately ordered the remaining horses guarded — and why, when his guard detail approached, the surviving herd "were So alarmed that they ran away and entered the woods," suggesting they had already been spooked by a previous human approach. None of this analysis appears in the Gass or Ordway entries; it is the captain’s privilege, and burden, to draw conclusions.
Lewis Alone on the Marias
Lewis’s entry from the Marias has no parallel narrator to corroborate or contradict it. His prose carries its own characteristic preoccupations: instruments, latitude, geomorphology. When a pack horse missed the ford and wet his instruments, Lewis dried the cases and noted that "they sustained no naterial injury" — the kind of detail Clark almost never records. Tracing a tributary closely confined between "clifts of freestone rocks," Lewis makes a geological inference that doubles as a Jeffersonian political concern:
being convinced that this stream came from the mountains I determined to pursue it as it will lead me to the most nothern point to which the waters of Maria’s river extend which I now fear will not be as far north as I wished and expected.
The phrase "which I now fear" is striking. The northern reach of the Marias mattered because the Louisiana Purchase boundary had been understood to follow the Missouri’s tributaries; a Marias that swung southwest rather than north meant a smaller territorial claim. Where Clark on the same day worries about stolen horses and a coming thunderstorm, Lewis worries about the latitude of a river. Both anxieties — pragmatic and geopolitical — would shape the violent encounter that awaited Lewis’s small party only six days later at the Two Medicine River.
