The journals of September 21, 1805, present an unusual structural feature: the expedition is physically divided, and its narrators record two distinct experiences on the same date. Lewis, Gass, and Ordway are still struggling through the timbered ridges west of the Bitterroots, while Clark — who had pressed ahead with an advance party — is already among the Nez Perce, gathering geographic intelligence and descending toward the Clearwater. Reading the four entries together reveals not only the practical division of labor but sharply different registers of observation.
The Rear Party: Hunger, Fallen Timber, and a Wolf for Supper
Lewis, Gass, and Ordway describe the same day’s march, but with telling differences in detail. Ordway, characteristically practical, records the cause of the late start and the texture of the trail:
not find all our horses untill about 10 oClock at which time we Set out, and proceed on soon crossed a creek and proceed on nearly a west course, over a rough trail. Some of the ridges the timber has been killed some time past by fires, and is fell across the trail so that we have some difficulty to pass
Lewis confirms the same obstacle in more elevated prose, calling the route “almost impracticable” through country where great quantities of timber had fallen. Where Ordway is content with “rough trail,” Lewis itemizes distances by leg — 2½ miles through bottom, 5 miles through broken hills, 5 more to the forks — producing a surveyor’s reconstruction of the day. Gass, whose entry survives only as a fragment here, contributes the human detail that the morning was “disagreeably cold,” a register of bodily discomfort that Lewis omits.
All three rear-party narrators converge on the evening meal. Ordway lists it plainly: a wolf killed by Lewis, three pheasants, a duck, and crawfish from the creek. Lewis, recording the same meal, frames it within the larger crisis of provisioning:
I killd a prarie woolf which together with the ballance of our horse beef and some crawfish which we obtained in the creek enabled us to make one more hearty meal, not knowing where the next was to be found. … I find myself growing weak for the want of food and most of the men complain of a similar deficiency and have fallen off very much.
This is one of Lewis’s most candid admissions of physical decline on the Lolo crossing. Ordway, notably, mentions the same meal without complaint — the men simply “eat them.” The contrast illustrates a recurring pattern: Lewis records the expedition’s suffering as narrative; Ordway records its mechanics.
The Advance Party: Clark’s Diplomatic Day
Clark’s entry — preserved here in two versions, a field note and a fuller revision — operates in an entirely different mode. Where Lewis catalogues fallen timber, Clark catalogues information. He sends out hunters in part as cover, deliberately delaying “with the Indians to prevent Suspicion & to acquire as much information as possible.” The intelligence he gathers is remarkable:
The Cheif drew me a kind of chart of the river, and informed me that a greater Cheif than himself was fishing at the river half a days march from his village called the twisted hare, and that the river forked a little below his Camp … the river passed thro’gh the mountains at which place was a great fall of the water passing through the rocks, at those falls white people lived from whome they preceured the white Beeds & Brass &c.
This is the expedition’s first concrete report, gathered from Indigenous testimony, of the Columbia’s lower course and of European or American traders at its mouth. The Nez Perce chief’s chart — a document now lost — was arguably the most consequential geographic intelligence Clark received between the Shoshone country and the Pacific. The two versions of Clark’s entry differ slightly: the field note describes the chief as “a Cherfull man of about 65,” while the revision drops the age and adds “with apparant Siencerity,” suggesting Clark refined his ethnographic framing on second writing.
Two Registers, One Expedition
The September 21 entries crystallize a division of narrative labor that runs through the journals as a whole. Lewis writes as naturalist and chronicler of the expedition’s interior life — he notes that “the Arborvita increases in quantity and size” and imagines “eligant perogues of at least 45 feet in length” from the cedars he passes. Clark writes as cartographer and diplomat, attentive to chiefs, medals, and river forks. Ordway and Gass, the enlisted journalists, record the day’s labor in a flatter idiom that often preserves details — the cold morning, the exact hour the horses were found, the crawfish — that the officers’ more composed entries elide. On a day when the party itself was split, the journals demonstrate why the expedition’s documentary record requires all four voices read together.
