July 3, 1806 marked one of the most consequential tactical decisions of the entire expedition: the deliberate division of the Corps into two parties at Travelers’ Rest, with Captain Lewis striking northeast toward the Missouri’s falls and Captain Clark turning south up the Bitterroot to recover the cached canoes at Camp Fortunate and explore the Yellowstone. Four narrators — Lewis, Clark, Sergeant Patrick Gass, and Sergeant John Ordway — left accounts of this day. Read together, they reveal sharp differences in register, observation, and the kinds of detail each man considered worth preserving.
The Farewell: Sentiment Versus Logistics
Only Lewis registers the emotional weight of the separation. He opens his entry with the deliberation of a commanding officer summing up months of planning:
All arrangements being now compleated for carrying into effect the several scheemes we had planed for execution on our return, we saddled our horses and set out I took leave of my worthy friend and companion Capt. Clark and the party that accompanyed him. I could not avoid feeling much concern on this occasion although I hoped this seperation was only momentary.
Clark, characteristically, records the parting in a single understated clause: “I took My leave of Capt Lewis and the indians and at 8 A M Set out.” The asymmetry is telling — Lewis writes as a literary stylist preoccupied with feeling and consequence, while Clark moves immediately to the practical roster, naming Charbonneau and Sacagawea and specifying their interpretive roles “for the Crow Inds” and “the Shoshoni.”
The enlisted journalists Gass and Ordway treat the division as a simple operational fact. Gass writes flatly that “Captain Lewis and his party went down Clarke’s river, and Captain Clarke with the rest of the party went up it.” Ordway, traveling with Clark, notes only that the captains “parted here with their parties.” Neither sergeant registers any sense of risk or sentiment — a register difference that recurs throughout the journals whenever the captains and their subordinates describe the same event.
The River Crossing: Lewis’s Near-Drowning
The day’s most dramatic incident — Lewis’s accident on the raft — appears in two accounts that diverge sharply in detail. Gass, present with Lewis’s party, gives the workmanlike summary:
we came to the forks : and made three rafts to carry ourselves and baggage over. The river here is about 150 yards wide, and very beautiful. We had to make three trips with our rafts, and in the evening got all over safe.
Gass’s “got all over safe” elides the fact that Lewis very nearly did not. Lewis himself supplies the missing scene: the raft, weakened by repeated trips, was “hurried down with the current a mile and a half,” sank on approach to shore, and he was “drawn off the raft by a bush and swam on shore.” The chronometer, which he had tucked into his fob “for greater security,” was soaked — a loss with serious navigational consequences. That Gass omits the captain’s dunking entirely is consistent with his pattern of protecting the dignity of the officers in his published narrative; Lewis, writing privately, had no such reason for reticence.
Gass also preserves an ethnographic detail Lewis records as well: the Nez Perce name for the route ahead. Gass renders it “Isquet-co-qual-la,” Lewis as “Cokahlarishkit” — both glossed as “the road to the buffaloe.” The variant spellings are useful evidence for linguists assessing how each man heard and transcribed Salishan and Sahaptian phonology.
Clark’s Valley: A Naturalist’s Inventory
While Lewis’s day was dominated by crisis, Clark’s was a comparatively serene 36-mile ride up the Bitterroot Valley, and his journal reflects it. Where Ordway summarizes the same route in a few brisk sentences — “we wrode fast & crossed a number of large creeks in which is beaver dams” — Clark produces a sustained botanical and topographical description. He distinguishes “2 Species of Clover,” identifying one as “the white Clover Common in the Western parts of the U. States” and the other as a smaller species the horses preferred. He counts streams (“haveing Crossed 8 Streams 4 of which were Small”), notes the snow line on the flanking mountains (“Covered with Snow for about 1/5 of the way from their tops downwards”), and identifies “the burring Squirel of the Species Common about the quawmarsh flatts.”
Ordway, covering the same ground with the same party, reports only “plains partly covd with pitch pine timber” and “a number of deer.” The contrast is a useful reminder that the captains’ journals are not merely longer versions of the sergeants’ — they are differently purposed documents, with Clark consciously cataloguing flora, fauna, and terrain for the scientific record.
One small human detail appears only in Clark: Private John Potts fell ill from “rideing a hard trotting horse,” and Clark administered “a pill of Opiom which Soon releve him.” Ordway, present in the same camp, says nothing of it. Both narrators close with the same complaint, registered in nearly identical phrasing across all four journals: the mosquitoes were intolerable.
