The expedition’s June 23, 1806 entries capture a single contingency plan from four vantage points: the two captains drafting nearly identical command-level summaries, Sergeant Gass narrating from inside the dispatched detachment, and Private Ordway offering a brief camp-side notice. Read together, the entries reveal how Lewis and Clark’s shared journal practice produced near-duplicate official records while the enlisted men preserved details the captains omit.
Twin Captains, Twin Entries
Lewis and Clark open their entries with virtually identical language. Lewis writes:
Apprehensive from Drewyer’s delay that he had met with some difficulty in procuring a guide, and also that the two indians who had promised to wait two nights for us would set out today, we thought it most advisable to dispatch Frazier and Wiser to them this morning
Clark’s version differs only in attributing the delay to Drewyer & Shannons
rather than Drewyer alone, and in reversing the order of the dispatched men to Wizer & Frazier.
The parallelism confirms the pattern visible across much of the return journey: the two captains either composed together or copied from a shared draft, with Clark frequently expanding minor details from his own observation.
One such expansion is substantive. Where Lewis simply notes that the three Nez Perce guides had agreed to accompany the party for the compensation of two guns,
Clark adds a paragraph of geopolitical intelligence absent from Lewis’s entry — that the Nez Perce and Walla Walla had made peace with the Shoshone agreeable to our late advice to them,
and that word had arrived via the Skeetsomish and Clark’s river that the Big bellies of Fort de Prarie Killed great numbers of the Shoshons and Otte lee Shoots.
Clark’s willingness to record native-sourced reports of distant violence — news that would have shaped the captains’ planning for the Missouri descent — marks one of the genuine divergences between the otherwise twinned entries.
The captains also diverge slightly on the hunters’ tally. Lewis reports 4 deer and a bear,
while Clark leaves the number blank: our hunters killed ____ deer today.
Such gaps in Clark’s manuscript, common throughout the journals, suggest he intended to fill in figures later from Lewis’s count or from a hunter’s report.
Gass on the Trail, Ordway in Camp
Sergeant Gass writes from inside the order the captains issued. Where Lewis and Clark describe the contingency in the conditional, Gass records its execution:
at noon two men came to our camp with orders for four of us to follow the Indians, if they were gone, until we should overtake them, and get them to halt if possible, till the party should come up; but if not, to follow them on and blaze the way after them
Gass alone records the detachment’s afternoon march, the overtaking of the Indians at the creek where the party had camped on the 19th and 20th, the two salmon-trout
the Nez Perce had caught, and a duck killed by one of his men. He also preserves a logistical detail the captains pass over — that one man was left behind to take care of the camp, and the lame horse and some more that were there.
Gass’s prose, plainer and more sequential than the captains’, reflects his role as field executor rather than planner.
Ordway, by contrast, offers the day’s briefest entry. He confirms the hunters’ success — though his count of two deer
in the afternoon conflicts with Lewis’s tally of four deer and a bear — and notes the return of Drewyer Shannon & Whitehouse
with the young chief and 2 other Indians.
Ordway alone preserves a small ecological observation: the Strawburys are pleanty about this place.
Such seasonal notes, scattered across his journal, often supply the texture missing from the captains’ more administrative prose.
Cross-Narrator Patterns
The entries together illustrate a recurring division of labor in the return-journey record. Lewis and Clark produce a shared command narrative, with Clark adding ethnographic and intelligence material. Gass, dispatched ahead, becomes the sole chronicler of the advance party’s movements — a role he will continue as the detachment blazes the Lolo trail toward Travelers’ Rest. Ordway, remaining with the main party, reduces the day to its essentials but catches the strawberries the others miss. No narrator invents; each records what his position allowed him to see.
