The journal entries for 28 July 1806 capture one of the most consequential days of the return journey, yet the four surviving narrators experienced it from radically different vantage points. Meriwether Lewis and his small reconnaissance party were riding hard for the Missouri after the fatal encounter with Piegan Blackfeet on the Two Medicine River; John Ordway and Patrick Gass were descending the Missouri with the white pirogue party from the Great Falls; and William Clark, far to the southeast, was floating down the Yellowstone (the Rochejhone), entirely unaware of the violence that had occurred two days earlier. The result is a four-voiced record in which three narrators converge at a single point on the Missouri while a fourth continues a parallel, geographically separate narrative.
Lewis’s Tactical Voice and the Reunion at the Point
Lewis’s entry is the most internally focused of the four. He is exhausted — “I was so soar from my ride yesterday that I could scarcely stand” — and preoccupied with the tactical problem of reaching the canoe party before any pursuing Blackfeet could intercept them. He records a debate with his men over the route:
the men proposed to pass the missouri at the grog spring where rose river approaches it so nearly and pass down on the S. W. side, to this I objected as it would delay us almost all day… I told them that we owed much to the safety of our friends and that we must wrisk our lives on this occasion.
Lewis’s prose preserves the command decision and the grim contingency plan — bridles tied together, a stand in the open plains. The reunion itself, when it comes, is rendered in a single rush of relief: “we heared the report of several rifles very distinctly on the river to our right, we quickly repared to this joyfull sound.” Notably, Lewis says almost nothing here about the skirmish itself; that narrative belongs, on this date, to others.
Gass and Ordway: Receiving the Story Secondhand
Because Gass and Ordway were on the river when Lewis rode in, their entries for 28 July are essentially debriefings — what they were told, in the moments after embracing their captain. The two accounts share a clear common source (Lewis’s own oral report) but diverge sharply in register and detail.
Gass, whose published journal was edited for a reading public, compresses the affair into a tidy summary. He notes the friendly exchange of robes, the medal given to a chief, and the morning theft:
after break of day the next morning, the Indians snatched up three of our men’s guns and ran off with them. One Indian had the guns of two men, who pursued and caught him, and one of them killed him with his knife.
Ordway, writing for himself, is far more vivid and physical. Where Gass writes that the Indian was killed “with his knife,” Ordway gives the moment in slow, terrible detail:
Reuben overhalled him [and] caught hold of the 2 guns had his knife drawn & as he Snatched away the guns perced his knife in to the Indians heart he drew but one breath the wind of his breath followed the knife & he fell dead.
The phrase “the wind of his breath followed the knife” is the kind of arresting sensory image that distinguishes Ordway’s manuscript from Gass’s smoothed-over published prose. Ordway also preserves diplomatic detail Gass omits — the Blackfeet’s invitation to visit their nation “under the blanket Mountn,” and Lewis’s counter-offer of a horse if they would come to the Marias. Both sergeants agree on the core facts, suggesting Lewis told the story once to the assembled men and each wrote it down from memory the same evening.
Clark’s Parallel World on the Yellowstone
Clark’s entry is the structural counterweight to the others. He knows nothing of the fight, nothing of Lewis’s hard ride, nothing of the reunion. His attention is wholly on the river beneath him: distances between creek mouths, the naming of Table Creek “from the tops of Several mounds in the Plains to the N W. resembling a table,” and a careful geological description of coal seams in the bluffs:
I passd. Straters of Coal in the banks on either Side those on the Stard. Bluffs was about 30 feet above the water and in 2 vanes from 4 to 8 feet thick, in a horozontal position.
Where Lewis catalogues human risk and Ordway catalogues bloodshed, Clark catalogues stratigraphy and game — elk “so abundant that we have not been out of Sight of them to day.” The juxtaposition is one of the expedition’s most striking accidents of the documentary record: on the same calendar day, one captain is recovering from killing a man and racing to save his command, while the other is identifying what he takes to be the Little Bighorn and noting beaver sign. Only when the two parties reunite at the Missouri-Yellowstone confluence will these narratives finally converge.
