The decision to abandon the first attempt on the Bitterroot crossing produced one of the expedition’s most revealing multi-narrator moments. All four journalists present — Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, John Ordway, and Patrick Gass — describe the same march down Hungry Creek, the same ascent into impassable snow, and the same reluctant retreat. Read side by side, the entries expose the layered authorship of the expedition record: the captains writing in near-lockstep, the sergeants compressing the day into more practical accounts, and each narrator preserving distinct details the others omit.
The Captains in Parallel
Lewis and Clark’s entries for June 17 are nearly identical in structure, phrasing, and even punctuation rhythm — a clear instance of one captain copying or jointly composing with the other. Compare Clark’s account of the summit:
here was Winter with all it’s rigors; the air was Cold my hands and feet were benumed.
with Lewis’s:
here was winter with all it’s rigors; the air was cold, my hands and feet were benumbed.
The reasoning that follows — the four-to-five-day estimate to reach the fish weirs at Colt Creek, the calculation that bewilderment would mean losing horses, baggage, instruments, and “perhaps our papers,” and the resolution to retreat “while they were yet strong and in good order” — appears almost verbatim in both journals. The only substantive divergence is the travel estimate itself: Clark writes “four days,” Lewis “five days.” Clark also adds a detail Lewis omits, recording that he was “in front” and could only follow the road by reading the trees “which had been peeled by the nativs for the iner bark of which they Scraped and eate.” That ethnobotanical observation — Nez Perce cambium harvesting marking the trail under snow — is unique to Clark’s entry.
Ordway and Gass: The Sergeants’ Register
Ordway’s entry tracks the captains’ narrative arc but in a plainer, more compressed register. Where Lewis frames the retreat in the elevated language of risking “the loss of the discoveries which we had already made,” Ordway simply writes that the officers “consulted on what was best to do. at length determined to our Sorrow to return.” His phrase “much against our expectations” and the bluntly physical “set in to hailling & raining at this time verry cold and disagreeable” convey the enlisted men’s experience of the decision rather than its strategic justification.
Gass, writing for eventual publication, produces the most polished prose of the four. He alone supplies the figure that the snow “in general carried our horses” — a practical observation Ordway echoes (“it bears. up our horses”) but the captains fold into a more abstract claim that “the snow boar our horses very well.” Gass also records the cache method with a craftsman’s specificity:
we hung up our loading on poles, tied to and extended between trees, covered it all safe with deer skins, and turned back melancholy and disappointed.
Lewis mentions only that “our baggage being laid on scaffoalds and well covered”; Gass tells the reader how the scaffold was built.
What Each Narrator Sees
The entries diverge most sharply in what each man chooses to preserve. Clark notes the peeled trees serving as trail markers. Lewis emphasizes the instruments and papers being deposited — a concern fitting his role as the expedition’s principal scientific recorder. Ordway captures the emotional texture of the reversal (“to our Sorrow,” “much against our expectations”). Gass, uniquely, carries the narrative forward into June 18, recording a man cutting himself “very badly with a large knife,” another thrown from a horse crossing the creek, and the curious detail that mosquitoes were troublesome on the lower creek “notwithstanding the snow is at so short a distance up the mountains.”
Taken together, the four entries demonstrate how the expedition’s documentary record was built in layers: the captains drafting a shared official account heavy with strategic reasoning, while Ordway and Gass preserved the procedural, emotional, and incidental details that the command narrative passed over. The retrograde march of June 17 is the same event in all four journals — and four distinguishable events in their telling.
