The morning of June 15, 1806 found the Corps of Discovery gathering scattered horses under a hard rain at the quamash fields, preparing for what they hoped would be their return crossing of the Bitterroot Mountains. All four journal-keepers present — Patrick Gass, John Ordway, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis — recorded the day’s labored march to a small glade beyond Collins’s Creek. Read together, the entries reveal both the close textual relationship among the enlisted men’s journals and the divergent priorities of the captains.
Parallel Structure, Shared Itinerary
Gass and Ordway track the day’s events in nearly identical sequence: collection of horses, delayed start, slippery ascent, the small prairie where Reubin Field and Willard had hung two deer, the descent to Collins’s Creek where a third deer had been killed, dinner, the difficult afternoon through fallen timber, and finally the glade with grass for the horses. Ordway adds quantitative detail Gass omits — the 8 o’clock departure, the count of “66 good horses to take us and our baggage across the mountains.” Gass echoes the same tally in plainer phrasing:
We left Com-mas flat to attempt to cross the moun-tains; and had sixty-six horses, all very good.
The shared horse count, the identical waypoints, and the matching adjective “slippery” suggest the sergeants were working from a common reckoning of the day, whether through conversation at camp or shared route notes. Ordway, however, includes timber identifications — “white ceedder timber balsom fer & diffrent kinds of pine” — that Gass passes over entirely.
The Captains Diverge
Clark and Lewis open with the same problem (straying horses, hard rain) and arrive at the same camp, but their entries part company in emphasis. Clark, characteristically, turns geographer. From a high point along the route he records a sweeping reconnaissance:
from the top of this Mountain I had an extensive view of the rocky Mountains to the South and the Columbian plains for great extent also the S W. Mountains and a range of high Mountains which divides the waters of Lewis’s & Clarks rivers…
He cross-references his own earlier travel, noting that they passed “the Creek on which I encamped on the 17th Septr. last” — a navigator’s habit of stitching the return route to the outbound one. None of the other three narrators mentions this view or the September correspondence.
Lewis, by contrast, attends to the country’s natural history. Where Ordway lists trees in passing, Lewis catalogues them with a botanist’s specificity: “long leafed pine, some pitch pine, larch, white pine, white cedar or arborvita of large size, and a variety of firs,” with reed-root undergrowth “from 6 to 10 feet high.” He notes the soil’s resemblance to Virginia red clay near the South West Mountains, and closes with a small set of ornithological observations the other three never record:
Saw the speckled woodpecker, bee martin and log cock or large woodpecker. found the nest of a humming bird, it had just began to lay its eggs.
Lewis also preserves a detail of frontier consequence that the others omit entirely — the hunters “had seen two large bear together the one black and the other white.” For a party that had repeatedly tangled with grizzlies on the Missouri, this report mattered, yet Gass, Ordway, and Clark let it pass.
Register and Reliability
The four entries together demonstrate the documentary value of the expedition’s redundant journal-keeping. Gass offers the compressed soldier’s account; Ordway supplies the timekeeper’s quantitative scaffold; Clark fixes the day in geographic space; Lewis fills in flora, fauna, and the wildlife intelligence that bears on safety. Where the enlisted men converge on the day’s labor — slippery road, fallen timber, three deer, glade with feed — the captains layer in the interpretive frames each habitually brought to the journals. The result is that no single entry from June 15 captures what the four together preserve: a mountain departure recorded simultaneously as ordeal, itinerary, panorama, and natural history.
