The entries for June 18, 1806 capture the Corps of Discovery in retreat after their first attempt to recross the Bitterroots had been turned back by snow. The captains had resolved to wait for Nez Perce guides, and the day’s three surviving accounts—by Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sergeant John Ordway—offer a striking case study in how the expedition’s record was layered: two near-identical captain’s journals and one independent enlisted man’s voice.
Twin Journals, Divergent Hands
Lewis and Clark’s entries for this date are so closely parallel that they almost certainly derive from a shared draft or close consultation. Both open with the identical observation that the horses had “straggled off to a considerable distance in surch of food on the sides of the mountains among the thick timber.” Both record the dispatch of Drouillard and Shannon to the Chopunnish (Nez Perce) with the same negotiating instructions: a single rifle offered as reward, escalating to
two other guns to be given them immediately and ten horses at the falls of Missouri.
The differences are largely orthographic and minor. Clark writes “Travellers rest Creek” where Lewis writes simply “traveller’s rest”; Clark notes the hunters saw “large fish,” while Lewis specifies “salmon.” Lewis, the trained field-medic of the pair, includes a clinical detail Clark omits entirely—his own treatment of Potts’s wound:
I found much difficulty in stoping the blood which I could not effect untill I applyed a tight bandage with a little cushon of wood and tow on the veign below the wound.
Clark records only that Potts “cut one of the large veins on the iner side of the leg.” The omission is telling: where Lewis is the actor, Clark is the chronicler.
Ordway’s Independent Eye
Sergeant Ordway’s entry, by contrast, is no copy. He writes in a plainer register and notices things the captains pass over. He alone names the destination village as “the pel-oll-pellow nation,” preserving a phonetic rendering the captains standardize to “Chopunnish.” He alone records the precise departure time—”about 8 oClock”—and the deployment of “4 men in front to clear the limbs and bushes out of the path,” a detail of trail labor invisible in the captains’ more strategic narration.
Ordway also gives the day’s weather its own paragraph:
came up a hard Shower of hail and rain and hard Thunder, which lasted about an hour and cleared off.
Neither Lewis nor Clark mentions the storm. For the captains, the day’s narrative arc is governed by the strategic problem—horses, guides, subsistence. For Ordway, the day is a sequence of physical events: an early start, brush-clearing, Potts’s knife, the creek crossing where “Colters horse threw him in the creek lost his blanket and hirt him a little,” the storm, the camp.
Cross-Narrator Patterns
The Colter incident is illuminating. Lewis and Clark dramatize it: horse and rider “were driven down the creek a considerable distance rolling over each other among the rocks,” and Colter “fortunately escaped without much injurey or the loss of his gun.” Ordway compresses the same event to a sentence and notes only the lost blanket and minor hurt. The captains’ version reads as retrospective shaping; Ordway’s reads as immediate report.
All three narrators close on the same anxieties: subsistence and mosquitoes. Lewis hopes “by means of the fish together with what deer and bear we can kill to be enabled to subsist untill our guide arrives without the necessity of returning to the quawmash flats.” Clark echoes this nearly verbatim. Ordway, characteristically, frames it as conditional labor:
we Camped in order to Stay if the hunters kill game untill a guide comes or untill the road is so that we can go but it depends on the hunters and game in a great measure.
Where the captains project a plan, Ordway acknowledges contingency. And only Ordway closes with the small, bodily fact that the others suppress: “the musquetoes verry troublesome at this place.” Clark, in his entry, writes only the truncated fragment “Musquetors Troubl—” before breaking off, suggesting his own fatigue.
Read together, the three accounts demonstrate the documentary architecture of the expedition: a captains’ record produced in tandem and aimed at official narrative, and a sergeant’s record produced independently, attentive to the daily mechanics—weather, hours, brush, insects—that the captains had the luxury of omitting.
