By mid-July 1806, the expedition had split into detachments pursuing separate routes back across the continent. The journal entries for July 14 capture this division with unusual clarity: Meriwether Lewis and Patrick Gass write from the portage camp above the Great Falls of the Missouri, attending to caches and equipment, while William Clark and John Ordway record the eastward push toward the Yellowstone. The four narrators, writing on the same day from camps separated by hundreds of miles, produce a layered record in which register, detail, and emphasis differ sharply.
The Falls Camp: Caching Against Anticipated Visitors
Lewis devotes his entry to logistics and precaution. The carriage wheels buried during the previous year’s portage are exhumed in good condition, the iron boat frame inspected, and meat sliced thin to dry. Most strikingly, Lewis describes relocating the party’s most valuable goods:
the old cash being too damp to venture to deposit my trunks &c in I sent them over to the Large island and had them put on a high scaffold among some thick brush and covered with skins. I take this precaution lest some indians may visit the men I leave here before the arrival of the main party and rob them.
Gass, writing as a sergeant under Lewis’s command, records the same operation in compressed form:
We deposited the most valuable part of our baggage and stores on a large island so that if the Indians came they would not get it.
The parallel is close enough to suggest Gass either took direct cues from Lewis’s spoken instructions or summarized the day’s collective activity. What Gass omits is telling: Lewis’s vivid scene of twenty-seven wolves gathered around a buffalo carcass in the water, his note on the disappearance of the buffalo, and his observation of the bee martin. Gass instead foregrounds a sensory complaint Lewis does not mention at all — the mosquitoes that tormented the party until a midday breeze drove them off. The two entries together reconstruct the camp more fully than either alone: Lewis the naturalist-commander, Gass the soldier registering bodily discomfort.
The Yellowstone Route: Clark’s Geography, Ordway’s Brevity
Clark’s entry is by far the longest of the four, and it carries the day’s most substantive geographic and ethnographic content. Crossing the Gallatin and pushing east-southeast, Clark finds himself nearly trapped in a beaver-engineered floodplain:
I proceeded on about two miles crossing those defferent chanels all of which was damed with beaver in Such a manner as to render the passage impracticable and after Swamped as I may Say in this bottom of beaver I was compelled to turn Short about to the right
It is Sacagawea — “the Squar” in Clark’s phrasing, “The Indian woman” a few lines later — who supplies the route forward, identifying a large road through the upper plain leading to the gap Clark is steering toward. Clark then preserves her extended testimony on Shoshone subsistence and the recent retreat of the buffalo from the upper valleys, attributing the change to Shoshone fear of crossing east of the mountains. This is one of the more substantial pieces of Indigenous geographic and ecological knowledge Clark records on the return journey, and it appears nowhere in the other three entries.
Ordway, traveling with Clark’s detachment, offers a starkly different account of the same day. His entry is terse, weather-driven, and focused on hunting outcomes: Colter kills two young beaver, the wind forces a halt, Willard kills a deer, Collins fails to rejoin camp. Where Clark sees a landscape shaped by beaver hydrology and Shoshone movement, Ordway sees wind, game tallies, and absent men. The editorial footnote accompanying Ordway’s text makes a useful point: from this date until Ordway rejoins Gass at the Falls, his journal is the only enlisted-man record of Clark’s overland march, making his brevity all the more notable against Clark’s expansiveness.
Register and Witness
The four entries together illustrate the stratified character of the expedition’s documentary record. Lewis and Clark, the captains, write at length and in distinct registers — Lewis attentive to specimens, numbers, and precaution; Clark to terrain, distance, and Indigenous testimony. Gass and Ordway, the sergeants, write shorter entries keyed to immediate experience: insects, wind, kills, missing men. On July 14, 1806, the same calendar date yields two camps, two narrative scales, and a reminder that the Corps’ “journal” is in fact a chorus of unequal voices, each preserving what the others let pass.
