By mid-July 1806 the Corps of Discovery had fractured into separate detachments, and the journals of July 17 capture four men writing from two different worlds. Meriwether Lewis pushes northward through the treeless plains toward the Marias River with a small, wary party. William Clark, hundreds of miles to the south, drifts down the Yellowstone with the squaw Sacagawea, Shannon, and the horse herd. John Ordway and Patrick Gass, traveling with the canoe party on the Missouri, contribute shorter notices that nonetheless echo the larger preoccupations of the day: weather, game, and the threat of unseen Indians.
Lewis on the Marias: Anxiety in an Ocean of Grass
Lewis’s entry is the longest and most literary of the four, and its tone is unmistakably tense. Having sketched the falls at dawn, he steers across what he likens to a seascape:
I steered my course through the wide and level plains which have somewhat the appearance of an ocean, not a tree nor a shrub to be seen… the whole face of the country as far as the eye can reach looks like a well shaved bowlinggreen, in which immence and numerous herds of buffaloe were seen feeding attended by their scarcely less numerous sheepherds the wolves.
The pastoral image dissolves the moment his party reaches Rose River and finds a wounded, bleeding buffalo. Lewis immediately suspects Indian hunters nearby and names his fear plainly:
The Minnetares of Fort de prarie and the blackfoot indians rove through this quarter of the country and as they are a vicious lawless and reather an abandoned set of wretches I wish to avoid an interview with them if possible.
He dispatches Drouillard to track the wounded animal and Reubin Field to scout a separate route, then climbs the river hills with his glass. The reconnaissance turns up nothing, but the entry’s cumulative detail — the hard, cracked soil, the short-grazed grass, the fortified vigilance — foreshadows the violent encounter with Piegan Blackfeet that will come only ten days later.
Clark on the Yellowstone: Ethnography by Observation
Clark’s parallel entry is preoccupied with the same threat but channels it through observation rather than apprehension. After describing creeks heading in snow-topped mountains and naming two tributaries Otter River and Beaver River, he records his discovery of an abandoned Indian fortification:
I Saw in one of those Small bottoms which I passed this evening an Indian fort which appears to have been built last Summer. this fort was built of logs and bark. the logs was put up very Closely capping on each other about 5 feet and Closely chinked… this work is about 50 feet Diameter & nearly round.
Where Lewis speculates about Blackfeet from a distance, Clark interrogates his interpreter. Sacagawea — referred to here only as “the Squaw” — supplies the ethnographic gloss that war parties build such structures when pursued by superior numbers on horseback. The detail is one Lewis could not have obtained on his branch of the expedition, and it shows Clark’s characteristic willingness to defer to Native informants on Native technology. Clark also notes a single pelican (his first on the Yellowstone), the increasing scarcity of cottonwood large enough for canoes, and a shift in game: “Buffalow is getting much more plenty than they were above. not so many Elk & more deer.”
Ordway and Gass: The Canoe Party’s Compressed Record
Ordway, traveling with the main canoe detachment, files a busy, practical entry. He notes Collins and Colter skinning two mountain sheep, a near-swamping of the canoes by high wind, a halt above the pine island rapids, two more bighorns killed by Cruzatte, a deer by Colter, and finally a safe passage down the rapids to a cottonwood camp “about 6 miles below.” His mention of bighorn skins and bones “Saved… for our officers to take to the States” is a small but telling reminder that scientific collection continues even amid the day’s hazards.
Gass, by contrast, is reduced in the surviving fragment to a single sentence about wind:
which drives away the musquitoes and relieves us from these tormenting insects.
The remark is trivial in isolation but reveals a recurring pattern in Gass’s journal: where Lewis philosophizes and Clark catalogs, Gass tends to record bodily comfort and discomfort. The mosquitoes that torment Gass go unmentioned by Lewis, who is too occupied with reconnaissance, and by Clark, who is absorbed in topography and the abandoned fort.
Patterns Across the Four Voices
The split command produces no textual copying on this date — the parties are too far apart — but the four entries align thematically around watchfulness. Lewis watches for Blackfeet through a spyglass; Clark reads a year-old fort as evidence of intertribal warfare; Ordway watches the wind on the rapids; Gass simply notes its mercy on the insects. Together the entries map the same anxiety at four different registers, from imperial geopolitics to personal annoyance.
