July 4, 1806, marked one of the more consequential days of the return journey: at Travelers’ Rest in the Bitterroot Valley, the Corps of Discovery prepared to divide into exploring parties, and the Nez Perce guides who had shepherded them across the Bitterroots prepared to turn homeward. Four expedition journals record the day, but the narrators were already physically separated — Lewis and Gass northbound toward the Great Falls of the Missouri, Clark and Ordway southbound toward the Three Forks. The result is a rare four-way comparison in which two pairs of writers describe overlapping but not identical events.
The Farewell to the Nez Perce Guides
Lewis and Gass, traveling together, both record the arrival of a lone Nez Perce man who had pursued the party over the mountains, and both describe the morning hunt intended to provision the guides for their return. The two accounts differ sharply in register. Gass, the carpenter-sergeant, offers a warm summary judgment:
it is but justice to say, that the whole nation to which they belong, are the most friendly, honest and ingenious people that we have seen in the course of our voyage and travels.
Lewis, by contrast, treats the parting as an occasion for ethnographic and geographic analysis. He identifies the late-arriving Indian specifically as “a man of the Pallote pellows” and recognizes him as the same young man who had attempted the Lolo crossing in early June. Where Gass generalizes about national character, Lewis extracts a strategic inference from the guides’ planned route:
it is worthy of remark that these people were about to return by the same pass by which they had conducted us through the difficult part of the Rocky Mountains, altho they were about to decend Clark’s river several days journey in surch of the Shale’s their relations, a circumstance which to my mind furnishes sufficient evidence that there is not so near or so good a rout to the plains of Columbia by land along that river as that which we came.
Lewis also captures an emotional register absent from Gass entirely — the guides “betrayed every emmotion of unfeigned regret at seperating from us” and warned that the Pahkees (Hidatsas) “would cut us off.” Gass, who often condenses Lewis’s longer reflections, omits both the warning and the geographic argument.
Clark’s Independence Day and Ordway’s Plain Record
Clark and Ordway, riding together up the west side of Clark’s River, describe a day dominated not by farewells but by dangerous creek crossings and hunting. Both note the swimming horses, both note the bighorn sheep, and both record the day’s deer kills — but only Clark marks the date’s significance:
This being the day of the decleration of Independence of the United States and a Day commonly Scelebrated by my Country I had every disposition to Selebrate this day and therefore halted early and partook of a Sumptious Dinner of a fat Saddle of Venison and Mush of Cows (roots)
Ordway’s parallel entry is striking for its omission. He records the same dinner halt — “halted at a branch to dine” — but says nothing of the Fourth of July, nothing of patriotic sentiment, and nothing of a “sumptious” meal. His prose is the workmanlike log of a sergeant: distances, game, terrain. Where Clark elaborates on the rapid creek that “passed over the backs and loads of the horses,” Ordway compresses the same event to “one so large it Swam Some of our horses.”
Lewis, meanwhile, makes no mention of Independence Day at all in the surviving entry — a notable silence given his usual attention to occasion. The patriotic framing of July 4, 1806, survives in the expedition record solely because Clark chose to write it down.
Patterns and Divergences
The four entries reveal a consistent pattern visible across the 1806 journals. Lewis writes as analyst and ethnographer, embedding strategic geographic arguments in daily entries. Clark writes as commander and host, attentive to ceremony, hospitality, and the human texture of the day. Gass condenses and moralizes, often paralleling Lewis but softening technical detail into generalization. Ordway records the barest operational facts, faithful but spare.
On a single day when the Corps physically divided, the journals divide along their own characteristic lines — geographic argument, patriotic ceremony, sentimental summary, and operational log — preserving July 4, 1806, as four distinct documents of the same parting.
