The accidental shooting of Meriwether Lewis by Pierre Cruzatte on August 11, 1806 is among the most consequential mishaps of the entire expedition — it ended Lewis’s regular journal-keeping and left subordinate narrators as the principal witnesses to its closing weeks. Because Lewis himself fell silent after this date, the accounts left by Sergeant Patrick Gass and Sergeant John Ordway take on outsized evidentiary weight. Read side by side, they agree on the basic facts but diverge in tone, sequence, and the matter of Cruzatte’s awareness.
Two Sergeants, Two Sequences
Gass structures his entry as a tactical narrative. He opens with the morning’s movement past Captain Clark’s encampment of the 8th, the elk gang at the burnt bluffs, and the dispatch of canoes to hunt. Only then does Lewis go ashore “with one of the men” — Gass conspicuously declines to name Cruzatte at the moment of the shooting. When Lewis returns, Gass writes:
In a short time Captain Lewis returned wounded and very much alarmed; and ordered us to our arms, supposing he had been shot at by Indians.
Gass then casts himself in the active role: “I went out with three men to reconnoitre and examine the bushes.” His account is that of the non-commissioned officer who took charge of the defensive response.
Ordway, by contrast, names Cruzatte immediately and reconstructs the shot itself with anatomical precision:
one of his balls hit Cap* Lewis in his back side and the ball passed through one Side of his buttock and the ball went out of the other Side of the other buttock and lodged at his overalls
Where Gass tells us only that the ball “had lodged in his overalls,” Ordway traces its full trajectory. Ordway also preserves a detail Gass omits entirely: that Lewis, faint though he was, “attempd to go back for battle” and had to be dissuaded by the men. This vignette of a wounded captain insisting on returning to a presumed Indian fight is precisely the sort of character-revealing moment Ordway tends to capture and Gass tends to compress.
The Question of Cruzatte’s Knowledge
The most interesting divergence concerns Cruzatte’s culpability. Gass reports the discovery flatly:
found on inquiry that he had shot him by accident through the hips, and without knowing it pursued the game.
Ordway is similarly charitable, writing that when the searching party found Cruzatte, “he had Seen no Indians then peter knew that it must have been him tho an exidant.” Both sergeants thus credit Cruzatte with genuine ignorance — the Frenchman, half-blind in one eye, mistook Lewis’s brown leather for elk and never realized his ball had struck a man until the search party reached him.
This unanimity below decks contrasts sharply with Lewis’s own later judgment, recorded after he resumed writing: that Cruzatte must have known immediately and dissembled. The editorial footnote in the Ordway volume flags this divergence directly, observing that “Both Gass and Ordway appear to credit Cruzatte with entire ignorance.” Whether the enlisted men were protecting a popular comrade, or whether Lewis’s suspicion was the product of a captain’s wounded pride and a painful convalescence, cannot be settled from the documents alone. But the social geography of the boat is visible in the disagreement: the sergeants sided, quietly, with the boatman.
Register and Reportage
The two accounts also differ in register. Gass, whose journal was prepared for publication, writes in tidy past-tense paragraphs with subordinate clauses and explanatory phrasing (“Having prepared for an attack,” “Having made this discovery”). Ordway’s field notation is rougher, with abbreviations (“Cap*,” “procd”), phonetic spellings (“gangue,” “exidant,” “perswaded”), and a loose paratactic rhythm. Where Gass smooths the day into narrative, Ordway records it in the order of perception: buffalo killed in the river at noon, the halt, Cruzatte going out, the elk in the thicket, the count of kills (Lewis one, Cruzatte two), and then the shot.
Both men close with the welcome news from Clark’s note — that Sergeant Pryor’s party, having had its horses stolen by Indians on the Yellowstone, had descended the river in skin (or “leather”) canoes and rejoined the main detachment. After a day that began with elk and ended with their captain bleeding face-down in the white pirogue, the reunion of Pryor’s missing men was a small consolation neither sergeant fails to record.
