The journals of July 20, 1806, capture the Corps of Discovery at its most geographically fractured. William Clark and his detachment labored along the Yellowstone, fashioning canoes for the descent to the Missouri. Meriwether Lewis pressed northward up the Marias River, probing toward the Saskatchewan watershed. Meanwhile, Patrick Gass and John Ordway—stationed at a third location with the canoe party near the Great Falls portage—occupied themselves with truck wagons and skin-dressing. Four narrators, three camps, and a striking divergence in what each man chose to record.
Clark’s Workshop on the Yellowstone
Clark’s entry is the most administratively dense of the four, reading like a foreman’s daybook. He dispatches Sergeant Pryor and Shields—men he identifies as “good judges of timber”—at daylight to scout downriver for cottonwoods larger than those near camp. When they return at half past eleven empty-handed, Clark commits to a practical solution:
I deturmined to have two Canoes made out of the largest of those trees and lash them together which will Cause them to be Study and fully Sufficient to take my Small party & Self with what little baggage we have down this river.
The detail is operational throughout: handles fitted into three axes, trees felled, dimensions estimated at “28 feet in length and about 16 or 18 inches deep.” Clark also notes the medical and material economy of the camp—Gibson’s wound dressed, Pryor dressing skins for clothing, the party “nearly naked” and needing hides before the overland push to the Mandans. The hunt is tallied with characteristic precision: Shields takes a deer and buffalo, Shannon a fawn and buffalo, York an elk. Wolves had eaten four of the five elk Labiche killed the previous evening, leaving only one skin recoverable.
Lewis the Naturalist on the Marias
Lewis, by contrast, writes as a geographer and natural historian. Where Clark counts axe handles, Lewis catalogues soil chemistry, geology, and hydrography. He describes a punishing surface for the horses:
the soil is generally a white or whiteish blue clay, this where it has been trodden by the buffaloe when wet has now become as firm as a brickbat and stands in an inumerable little points quite as formidable to our horses feet as the gravel.
Lewis distinguishes the Marias bluffs from those of the upper Missouri, noting that the latter are “composed of firm red or yellow clay which dose not yeald readily to the rains.” He speculates—accurately, as later cartography would confirm partially—about the southern branch of the Saskatchewan drawing waters near the Marias. He also registers an ecological observation Clark never makes: the buffalo prefer the mineral-salt pools to river water. And he closes with a note of relief that recurs across the expedition’s summer entries: “the musquetoes have not been troublesome to us since we left the whitebear islands.”
Gass and Ordway: The Forgotten Third Camp
The Gass and Ordway entries are the day’s quiet counterpoint, and reading them together reveals the close textual relationship long noted between these two enlisted-men diarists. Both record the same essential facts: the wagons are being repaired, the men are dressing skins, and the harness trial succeeds. Gass writes tersely that the men “tried our horses in harness and found they would draw very well.” Ordway expands the same moment:
towards evening we got up our our 4 horses [and] tackled them in the truck waggons found they would draw but were covred thick with Musquetoes and Small flys
Ordway’s parallel phrasing—”found they would draw”—echoes Gass almost verbatim, a recurring pattern in their journals that scholars have variously attributed to shared authorship circumstances or to Ordway expanding Gass’s notes. Crucially, where Lewis celebrates the absence of mosquitoes on the Marias, Ordway and Gass document the opposite condition at the portage camp. Ordway is emphatic: the men dressing skins are “tormented by the Musquetoes and Small flys,” and even the harnessed horses emerge “covred thick” with them.
Patterns Across the Day
Three observations emerge from reading the four entries together. First, register: Clark writes as captain-of-works, Lewis as scientist-explorer, Gass as laconic NCO, Ordway as the expansive enlisted chronicler who fills in what Gass leaves out. Second, the mosquito record forms an unintended environmental transect across Montana on a single date—absent on the Marias, present but unmentioned on the Yellowstone, oppressive at the portage. Third, only Clark records the wolves’ depredations on cached game, a detail consistent with his role as hunt-master, while only Lewis speculates on continental hydrography, consistent with his standing instructions from Jefferson. The division of the party had, by July 20, produced a corresponding division of attention.
