July 25, 1806 finds the Corps of Discovery split across the breadth of present-day Montana. Far to the southeast, Captain Clark is inscribing his name on the sandstone monolith he names Pompy’s Tower. But for the detachment under Sergeant Patrick Gass at the Great Falls portage, the day is one of mud, rain, and the grinding labor of moving canoes across the plains. Two journals — Gass’s and John Ordway’s — preserve this day from inside the same wagon party, and a careful comparison reveals how differently two enlisted men could narrate identical hours.
Parallel Accounts, Divergent Emphases
Both Gass and Ordway describe the same sequence: an early start, the return for additional canoes, a violent afternoon thunderstorm, and an arrival at Portage River by evening. Gass, writing in his characteristically orderly sergeant’s prose, frames the day around logistical decisions:
which is all we will bring over, as the other is very heavy and injured; and we expect that the five small ones with the periogues will be suf- ficient to carry ourselves and baggage down the Missouri.
Gass thinks ahead. He records not only what was done but why, and what the consequences will be for the descent of the Missouri. His sentence about leaving one canoe behind is essentially a piece of operational reasoning preserved in the journal — the kind of detail a non-commissioned officer responsible for transport would naturally note.
Ordway, by contrast, gives a more bodily, immediate account. Where Gass writes that “it rained on us hard all the way,” Ordway describes the consequences in vivid texture:
in the evening we got to portage Creek and Camped, rained verry hard and we having no Shelter Some of the men and myself turned over a canoe & lay under it others Set up by the fires, the water run under us and the ground was covred with water
This is one of the most evocative camp scenes in Ordway’s entire journal — men huddled beneath an inverted canoe while water flows across the ground. Gass mentions arriving at Portage River and notes that four canoes are now safe there, but offers nothing of the night’s misery. The register difference is striking: Gass closes his entry on inventory; Ordway closes his on suffering and a hunter’s tally — “Collins killed a buffaloe and a brarow.”
What Each Narrator Sees
Ordway alone records that two men were left at Portage Creek — one to cook and one to hunt — a small operational detail that Gass omits despite his usual attention to such matters. Ordway also notes that “the portage River raises fast,” an observation about the rising water that would prove relevant to the next day’s work. Gass, however, captures something Ordway does not: the precise role of the men in moving the wagons, writing that “the horses were not able to haul the loads, without the assistance of every man at the waggons.” This is Gass at his most characteristic — attentive to the mechanics of labor and the deployment of manpower.
The two accounts also differ on Gass’s own condition. Gass mentions, almost in passing, that he “was by this time so much recovered as to be able to return with the party for another canoe.” Ordway makes no reference to Gass’s recent illness or recovery. This is one of the rare moments where Gass’s journal preserves personal information that the parallel record entirely overlooks.
A Day of Two Geographies
Read alongside Clark’s famous inscription at Pompy’s Tower hundreds of miles to the southeast, the Gass and Ordway entries underscore how dispersed the expedition has become in its final summer. While Clark carves “Wm Clark July 25 1806” into sandstone — leaving what remains the only physical trace of the Corps still in its original location — Gass and Ordway are crouched under a canoe in the rain, hauling waterlogged wagons across familiar mud. Neither party knows what the other is doing on this date. The journals would not be reconciled until the captains reunited at the confluence of the Yellowstone and the Missouri in mid-August.
That the same date produced both a triumphant geographic gesture and a soaking, sleepless camp speaks to the texture of the return journey: spectacle and drudgery proceeding on parallel tracks, recorded by different hands, and reassembled only later by readers like us.
