June 14, 1806 found the Corps of Discovery encamped on the eastern slope of the Bitterroots, packing their baggage for a second attempt at the snow-clogged Lolo Trail. Their first effort, a few days earlier, had been turned back by drifts too deep for the horses to find forage. Four journalists — Patrick Gass, John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis — set down accounts of the same hours. Read together, the entries reveal a striking range of register, attention, and emotional weight.
The Hunters’ Returns: A Shared Skeleton of Facts
All four narrators record the same core event: hunters were sent out early; John Colter returned around 10 A.M. with a deer; the others came in empty-handed. Gass, characteristically brief, compresses the day into a single sentence:
again went out; at 10 o’clock one came in with a deer; and in the evening the rest of them, but they had not killed any thing.
Gass does not name Colter, nor does he mention the packing of baggage or the prospect of the morning’s departure. Ordway is similarly compact but adds two details Gass omits — Colter by name, the eight ducks’ eggs, and the warmth of the day:
out eairly about 10 oClock Colter came in had killed a deer and found eight ducks eggs, the day verry warm.
The duck eggs appear in no other journal for this date — a small ethnographic-naturalist detail that Ordway alone bothers to capture. Clark and Lewis, by contrast, both name Colter, both note that George Drouillard came in late after wounding but failing to recover deer, and both move quickly past the hunt to the larger preoccupation: tomorrow’s march.
Clark and Lewis: Parallel Drafts, Diverging Anxieties
The captains’ entries for June 14 show their familiar pattern of close textual kinship — they evidently conferred or copied from a shared field draft — but the divergences are revealing. Both report that the articles were packed, the horses caught and hobbled, and that roughly four days of the route lay over snow-covered heights. Clark writes:
we expect to Set out early, and Shall proceed with as much expedition as possible over those Snowey tremendious mountains which has detained us near five weeks in this neighbourhood waiting for the Snows to melt Sufficent for us to pass over them.
Lewis covers the same ground but reframes the delay as a calendar problem rather than a topographical one:
we have now been detained near five weeks in consequence of the snows; a serious loss of time at this delightfull season for traveling.
Clark’s adjective is tremendious — the mountains themselves are the antagonist. Lewis’s adjective is delightfull, applied to the season being squandered; his enemy is the lost time. Where Clark shudders at the prospect (“I Shudder with the expectation with great dificuelties in passing those Mountains”), Lewis steels himself:
this I am detirmined to accomplish if within the compass of human power.
The contrast is characteristic. Clark’s prose runs to physical sensation and concrete fear — depth of snow, want of grass, the body’s response. Lewis turns toward resolve and rhetorical climax, ending on a near-aphoristic flourish about human power. Clark also volunteers a piece of geographic speculation Lewis omits: that the summit “is Covered with Snow the greater part of the year.”
Register and Audience
The four entries together suggest something about intended audience. Gass and Ordway, the sergeants, write for the record — terse, factual, pragmatic. Their journals were working logs. Clark and Lewis, by contrast, write for posterity, and on June 14 both reach for emotional summation on the eve of a dangerous undertaking. Lewis’s entry in particular reads as a passage drafted with the eventual published narrative in mind: “every body seems anxious to be in motion.”
It is a small editorial flourish — but characteristic of how Lewis, more than any other narrator on the expedition, shapes the day’s events into a story already aware of being read. Ordway’s duck eggs and Gass’s plain hunters will, in the end, be the details that bring the camp back into focus.
