The entries of June 21, 1806 capture a rare moment of tactical retreat for the Corps of Discovery. Having attempted the Lolo crossing and found the snowpack still too deep, the party turned back toward the camas flats at Weippe — a humbling reversal that all three narrators record, though with markedly different registers and emphases.
Twin Captains, Twin Texts
The Lewis and Clark entries for this date are virtually identical, a pattern familiar to readers of the return journey. Both captains open with the same admission of wounded pride. Clark writes:
we all felt Some mortification in being thus compelled to retrace our Steps through this tedious and difficuelt part of our rout, obstructed with brush and innumerable logs and fallen timber which renders the traveling distressing and even dangerous to our horses.
Lewis’s version differs only in spelling (“parsel” for Clark’s “parcel,” “graize” for “graze,” “evidently” for “eventually”). The textual dependence runs in both directions on the return leg, with the captains evidently sharing a single field draft and copying it into their respective books. One small detail appears only in Lewis’s manuscript: a self-referential geographic note that the dining halt was “the same place I had halted and remained all night with the party on the ____ of Septembr last” — a blank Lewis intended to fill from his westbound journal but never did. Clark omits this aside entirely, suggesting Lewis added it during his own transcription rather than drawing from a shared source.
Both captains catalogue the day’s equine losses with identical phrasing: Thompson’s horse “choked” or suffering “distemper,” and Cruzatte’s “excellent horse” snagged in the groin while leaping deadfall. The repetition of “no further service to us” twice in two sentences underscores how seriously the officers regarded the attrition of their mounts at this critical juncture.
Ordway’s Practical Intelligence
Sergeant Ordway’s entry, while shorter, preserves information the captains did not record — a recurring pattern in his journal. Where Lewis and Clark merely note that the two Nez Perce travelers were “on their way over the mountain,” Ordway captures the substance of the conversation:
these 2 Indians told us that we could have went on if in case we could have found the road, for as the Snow bears up the horses all can cross the high parts which is covred so thick with Snow in about 3 days and our horses cannot git any thing to eat dureing that time
This is precisely the technical guidance the expedition needed: the snow crust will support horses, but the three-day forage gap is the real obstacle. The captains, focused on the embarrassment of retreat and the diplomatic question of securing guides, do not transmit this practical hydrological-seasonal knowledge. Ordway’s habit of recording such operational detail — likely overheard through Drouillard’s signs or the limited Nez Perce vocabulary the men had acquired — fills a consistent gap in the official record.
Ordway also identifies the hunter who brought in the day’s single deer: “Shields had killed & brought in one deer.” Lewis and Clark mention only that hunters “so far succeeded as to kill one deer,” anonymizing the contribution. Throughout the journals, Ordway is more reliable than the captains for naming individual enlisted men’s specific accomplishments.
Counting the Horses
A minor numerical discrepancy reveals how each narrator processed the encounter. Ordway reports the two Nez Perce had “5 horses of their own,” while Lewis and Clark both specify “four Supernoumery horses” (i.e., four extra beyond what the men were riding). Ordway also states the Indians were returning “our 4 horses,” while the captains specify “the three horses and the Mule” — a more precise inventory. The captains distinguish horse from mule; Ordway lumps the animals together. Such small divergences are characteristic: Ordway captures dialogue and movement, while Lewis and Clark, writing from the same shared draft, attend more carefully to property accounting.
The day ends with the party once more at the “old encampment” of June 10–15, awaiting Drouillard and Shannon, whose unexplained delay introduces the next thread of uncertainty. All three narrators agree on this anxious conclusion, though only the captains use the telling phrase “anxiously await.”
