The journal entries of Sergeants John Ordway and Patrick Gass for September 16, 1805, present one of the more puzzling cross-narrator divergences of the Lolo Trail crossing. Both men were Corps of Discovery sergeants charged with keeping daily records, both were traveling the same trail through the Bitterroot Mountains, and both wrote on the same date — yet their accounts share almost no concrete details.
Ordway’s Snowbound Misery
Ordway opens with a striking image of the men waking buried under fresh snow:
great Surprize we were covred with Snow, which had fell about 2 Inches deep the later part of last night, & continues a cold Snowey morning.
His entry is dominated by cold, hunger, and the sheer effort of keeping to the trace. Ordway records that the party “could Scarsely keep the old trail for the Snow,” that the clouds hung so low “it appeared as if we have been in the clouds all this day,” and that by camp the snow had deepened to roughly four inches. He estimates fifteen miles covered. The day closes with one of the bluntest sentences in his journal:
we all being hungry and nothing to eat except a little portable soup which kept us verry weak, we killed another colt & eat half of it.
This is the Lolo Trail at its worst — the moment the curated context describes as the expedition’s nearest brush with “complete failure.” Ordway’s prose is plain, cumulative, and physical: snow, soup, colt, weakness.
Gass’s Warm Spring and Lost Horse
Gass, by contrast, describes a wholly different landscape. He records no snow at all. Instead his entry is organized around two episodes: a search for a missing horse, and the discovery of a thermal spring.
we came to a most beautiful warm spring, the water of which is considerably above blood-heat; and I could not bear my hand in it without uneasiness.
He notes that the network of game and Indian trails converging on the spring confused the guide — almost certainly Old Toby — who “took a wrong one for a mile or two.” Gass also reports that Captain Lewis had stayed behind with several men to look for the lost horse and rejoined the main party only at the noon halt. The hunters had killed nothing since the previous morning, though a deer was found hanging where hunters had cached it. Gass logs twelve miles to camp on a creek bordered by small prairies.
Reading the Divergence
The contrast is stark enough to demand explanation. Ordway describes deep snow, low cloud, and the killing of a colt; Gass describes a warm spring, scattered prairies, and a recovered deer. Neither sergeant mentions the detail the other foregrounds.
Several factors likely converge here. First, Gass’s published 1807 journal was heavily edited by David McKeehan and is known to compress and reorder events; the warm spring episode and lost-horse search may belong to an adjacent date that McKeehan consolidated. Second, the party was strung out along a difficult trail, with Lewis lagging behind to search for the horse, so the two sergeants may genuinely have experienced different weather and terrain at different elevations during the same calendar day. Ordway, attached to Clark’s advance party, was pushing higher into the snow line; Gass’s entry reads as if written from a position lower on the trail or earlier in the day’s climb.
Third, register matters. Ordway writes in the granular, weather-obsessed idiom of a working sergeant logging conditions hour by hour. Gass — or McKeehan’s revision of Gass — favors discrete narrative incidents: the spring, the wrong path, the hanging deer. Where Ordway gives texture, Gass gives episodes.
Captains Lewis and Clark are absent as narrators on this date in the sources provided, though both appear as actors: Clark shooting unsuccessfully at a deer in Ordway’s account, Lewis trailing behind with the lost horse in Gass’s. The sergeants’ journals are the only contemporary windows onto September 16, and their disagreement is itself part of the historical record. Taken together, the two entries capture a Corps fragmented across miles of mountain trail — some men hungry in the snow eating colt meat, others bathing their hands in a spring too hot to bear.
