August 6, 1806 finds the Corps of Discovery still divided, with Captain Lewis descending the Missouri after his Marias River reconnaissance and Captain Clark moving down toward the reunion point with his own party. Four journal-keepers — Lewis, Clark, Gass, and Ordway — leave entries for the date, and their accounts diverge sharply in subject matter even as they share a common antagonist: a violent northeast wind that pinned both flotillas to shore for hours.
The Storm and the Wind: Lewis’s Detail Versus the Sergeants’ Brevity
Lewis devotes the opening of his entry to a harrowing nighttime storm that struck his exposed camp:
A little after dark last evening a violent storm arrose to the N. E. and shortly after came on attended with violent Thunder lightning and some hail; the rain fell in a mere torrant and the wind blew so violently that it was with difficulty I could have the small canoes unloaded before they filled with water… in attending to the canoes I got wet to the skin and having no shelter on land I betook myself to the orning of the perogue which I had, formed of Elkskin.
Clark, encamped separately, registers the same weather system but in compressed form:
I rose very wet. about 11 P M last night the wind become very hard for a fiew minits Suckceeded by Sharp lightning and hard Claps of Thunder and rained for about 2 hours very hard.
The two captains’ near-identical timing — a late-evening storm out of the northeast lasting roughly two hours — confirms that both parties weathered the same front, though Clark’s account is far more terse than Lewis’s vivid scene of unloading canoes by lightning-flash and sheltering under an elkskin awning.
Sergeants Gass and Ordway, traveling with Lewis, omit the night storm entirely and focus instead on the daytime wind that halted progress. Gass writes that “at 12 o’clock the wind blew so violent that it became dangerous to go on, and we halted,” while Ordway notes simply, “the wind rose high So [we] halted.” Both sergeants record a delay of “three hours” — a near-verbatim agreement that suggests the practice, common in the expedition’s enlisted journals, of comparing notes or copying. Lewis, by contrast, gives the duration differently: he laid by until 4 P.M., resuming for only about five miles before camping.
What Each Narrator Sees: A Bighorn, a Bear, and Drowned Buffalo
The most striking divergence on this date is what the narrators choose to record beyond weather and miles. Clark’s entry is by far the richest in natural-history observation. He alone reports a female bighorn that appeared on the bluff above his camp and was shot by Labiche; he alone describes a large white bear — a grizzly — that mistook the floating canoes for buffalo:
This morning a very large Bear of white Specis, discovered us floating in the water and takeing us, as I prosume to be Buffalow imediately plunged into the river and prosued us. I directed the men to be Still. this animal Came within about 40 yards of us, and tacked about. we all fired into him without killing him.
Clark also notes evidence of recent Indian root-digging (“not more than 7 or 8 days past”), drowned buffalo floating in both the Missouri and the Yellowstone, and — characteristically — offers a causal hypothesis for the lean condition of the deer:
only 2 of those deer were fat owing as I suppose to the Musquetors which are So noumerous and troublesom to them that they Cannot feed except under the torments of millions of those Musquetors.
Lewis, on his stretch of river, reports the opposite condition. “We killed three fat cows and a buck… game is so abundant and gentle that we kill it when we please.” Ordway echoes Lewis’s abundance with characteristic enthusiasm: “a fat Elk killd and 2 fat buffaloe… the buffaloe Elk and all kinds of game are pleanty and verry tame.” The contrast between Clark’s mosquito-ravaged deer and Lewis’s fat cows suggests genuine ecological variation between the two parties’ locations, not merely differences in observation.
Register and Reliability
Gass supplies one detail the others omit: a wounded buck that escaped into the river and had to be pursued by canoe. He also records that “we have yet seen nothing of the two hunters who had been left behind in the small canoe” — an anxious thread the captains do not pick up here, though Lewis mentions that “the Feildses went on ahead this evening and we did not overtake them.” Whether Gass’s missing hunters are the Field brothers is ambiguous from the entries alone.
The day exemplifies a pattern visible throughout the return voyage: Clark as the most expansive natural historian, Lewis as the most introspective scene-setter, and the sergeants as practical chroniclers of distance, weather, and game — with Gass and Ordway frequently aligning on numerical details in ways that hint at shared sourcing.
