By July 6, 1806, Captains Lewis and Clark had divided the Corps of Discovery to explore separate return routes. Lewis pressed eastward toward the Great Falls of the Missouri along the Cokahlarishkit (Blackfoot) River, accompanied by Patrick Gass and a small party. Clark, with John Ordway and the larger contingent, moved southeast toward the Three Forks of the Missouri, guided in part by Sacagawea’s recollections of her childhood country. The four journal entries from this single date offer a rare opportunity to compare not only divergent geographies but divergent narrative sensibilities.
Parallel Pens: Lewis and Gass on the Cokahlarishkit
Lewis and Gass traveled together, and their entries describe the same landscape — yet the textures could hardly differ more. Lewis writes with a surveyor’s discipline, organizing his day by compass bearing and distance:
East 14 M. to the point at which the river leaves the extensive plains and enters the mountains these plains I called the prarie of the knobs from a number of knobs being irregularly scattered through it.
Lewis catalogs the day’s natural history with characteristic breadth: “Curloos, bee martains woodpeckers plover robins, doves, ravens, hawks and a variety of sparrows,” alongside “the bois rague in blume” and preserved specimens of “southern wood and two other speceis of shrub.” He also registers the party’s anxiety about the “returning war-party of the Minnetares of Fort de prarie,” noting they are “much on our guard both day and night” — a tension entirely absent from Gass.
Gass, by contrast, gives a sergeant’s plain account: distances rounded, scenery rendered in the period’s stock vocabulary of the picturesque. Where Lewis names the prairie of the knobs, Gass merely records, “we passed a beautiful small lake.” Both note the same north fork crossing — Lewis at 45 yards wide, Gass at 40 yards and “mid-rib deep on our horses” — but Gass’s interest is operational, telling readers that “two men out every day hunting” produced four deer. The two accounts are clearly independent compositions describing shared experience, not derivative copies.
Clark’s Party and Sacagawea’s Country
Clark and Ordway, meanwhile, were crossing the divide between the Bitterroot drainage and the headwaters of the Jefferson (which Clark calls Wisdom River). Both men record the same striking event of the day: Sacagawea’s recognition of her homeland. Ordway puts it briefly:
our Intrepters wife tells us that we She knows the country & that this branch is the head waters of jeffersons river
Clark, writing at greater length, transforms the same moment into something approaching ethnographic testimony. He names her — “the Indian woman wife to Shabono” — and reproduces her wayfinding instructions in indirect discourse with notable specificity: she had “been in this plain frequently and knew it well,” and could direct them to a gap in the mountains, beyond which “we would See a high point of a mountain covered with snow in our direction to the canoes.” Clark even records her bearings, “S. 56° E,” treating her geographic knowledge as navigational data on par with his own compass work. Where Ordway compresses, Clark elaborates — and in elaborating, he preserves one of the journals’ clearest acknowledgments of Sacagawea’s authority as a guide.
A Storm Felt on Both Sides of the Divide
The afternoon thunderstorm that struck Clark’s party shows the same divergence in register. Ordway records it laconically: “a hard Thunder Shower of hail rain and hard wind, we halted a short time in the midst of it then proceed on.” Clark devotes a small set-piece to the same gust, describing how he “discovd. the rain wind as it approached and halted and formd. a solid column to protect our Selves from the Violency of the gust” — the men huddled together as windbreak. The storm itself, blowing “imediately from off the Snow Mountains,” lasted an hour and a half by Clark’s clock and not at all by Ordway’s.
Across the divide, Lewis and Gass mention no storm — a useful reminder that the two parties, though writing on the same date under the same masthead, were already inhabiting different weather, different watersheds, and different anxieties. Lewis watched for Blackfeet; Clark watched for landmarks his guide had described from memory. The entries of July 6 are best read not as four versions of one day but as two pairs of complementary accounts, each pair revealing how rank, role, and rhetorical training shaped what an expedition member chose to write down.
