The entries of June 26, 1806, capture the Corps of Discovery on the second day of its second — and ultimately successful — attempt to recross the Bitterroot Mountains. Guided now by Nez Perce horsemen who knew the buried trail, the party retrieved the baggage it had cached on June 17 during the failed first attempt and pressed eastward over snow-choked ridges before dropping to a bare hillside with grass for the horses. Sergeants Patrick Gass and John Ordway both record the day, and a side-by-side reading reveals how two enlisted journalists, often presumed to echo one another, in fact diverged in emphasis and method.
Two Measurements of the Same Snow
Both sergeants pause at the cache site to gauge how much the snowpack had settled in the nine days since the retreat. The numbers they report, however, are strikingly different. Gass offers a precise figure on both counts:
The snow here had sunk twenty inches… We measured the depth of the snow here and found it ten feet ten inches.
Ordway, by contrast, gives only the settling and omits the absolute depth:
we find the Snow has Settled a little more than 2 feet Since we left this the other day.
The discrepancy is small — twenty inches versus “a little more than 2 feet” — but it is characteristic. Gass, whose published 1807 narrative was edited for a reading public, tends throughout the expedition toward round, declarative measurements. Ordway, writing in a working field journal, is more often approximate. Neither man here appears to be copying the other; the figures differ enough that independent observation, or independent recollection of a shared measurement, is the likelier explanation. What Gass uniquely preserves is the staggering absolute: nearly eleven feet of snow still lying on the ground at the end of June.
What Each Sergeant Notices
Beyond the measurements, the two entries diverge in their attention. Gass is the more attentive naturalist of the day’s march. He notes that the banks of snow had “much decreased” early in the morning, observes that the snow “was not so deep in the drafts between” the steep summits, and closes with weather: “Some heavy showers of rain had fallen in the afternoon.” His prose tracks the texture of the terrain — where the snow lay deep, where it thinned, where the horses could and could not feed.
Ordway records none of these particulars. He compresses the day’s travel into a single clause — “proceeded on thro Snow deep” — and reserves his detail for the human dimension of the march:
Soon after we Camped another Indn Came up who is going over the mount” with us.
This is a detail Gass omits entirely. The arrival of an additional Nez Perce guide at the evening camp is precisely the kind of social and logistical fact that Ordway, ever attentive to the composition of the party, tends to capture and that Gass, focused on landscape and labor, tends to pass over. Read together, the two entries reconstruct a fuller picture than either alone: a day measured in feet of snow, miles of steep ridge, hours without forage, and a quiet expansion of the Indigenous escort on whom the crossing depended.
The Silent Presence of the Guides
Neither sergeant on this date dwells on the role of the Nez Perce guides, yet their presence shapes every line. The first attempt at this crossing, only nine days earlier, had ended in retreat; the difference now was Indigenous knowledge of a trail buried under ten feet of snow. Lewis, writing elsewhere on the return, would acknowledge that without such guidance the party “should have been bewildered in these mountains.” Ordway’s offhand notice that another Indian “Came up who is going over the mount” with us” is the only direct trace of that dependency in the day’s enlisted record — a small notation that, in retrospect, carries much of the weight of the crossing’s success. Gass closes his entry with horses fed and men encamped on bare ground; Ordway closes his with the party quietly growing by one. Both endings point to the same fact: the Bitterroots were being crossed, this time, on terms set by those who already knew the way.
