By July 12, 1806, the Corps of Discovery had split into detachments executing Captain Lewis’s ambitious plan to explore multiple river systems on the return journey. Lewis’s party labored at the portage camp above the Great Falls of the Missouri, while Clark’s detachment pushed down the Jefferson toward the Three Forks. The four surviving journals from this date — Lewis, Clark, Gass, and Ordway — document not one day but two, separated by hundreds of miles, yet linked by parallel struggles with weather, water, and animals.
The Missing Horses: Lewis and Gass at the Great Falls
Lewis opens with administrative precision, noting that the canoes were finished by 10 A.M. and that ten of the party’s best horses were missing. His suspicion is immediate and pointed:
I fear that they are stolen. I dispatch two men on horseback in surch of them.
Sergeant Gass, one of those dispatched, gives the same event from inside the search party. Where Lewis tracks the day from a commander’s vantage — sending out Werner, then Joseph Fields and Drouillard, receiving each report — Gass records only his own movement:
I then set out to look for them, went seven miles up Medicine river, where I found three of them and returned to camp.
The two accounts dovetail neatly. Lewis writes that “Sergt. Gass did not return untill 3 P.M. not having found the horses” and that Werner had found three near Fort Mountain at noon. Gass claims the three himself, and the discrepancy in mileage — Gass’s seven miles versus Lewis’s eight — is the kind of small variance typical when a sergeant reports orally to his captain. Gass omits the theft anxiety entirely; his register is the laconic enlisted-man’s log, recording action without speculation.
Lewis alone supplies the day’s natural-history observations — the brown thrush, the pigeons and doves, the ripening yellow currants, the comparative luxuriance of grass against the previous July. This pattern recurs throughout 1806: Lewis layers scientific notice atop logistical narrative, while Gass strips events to their operational bones.
The Canoe Under the Log: Clark and Ordway on the Jefferson
Far to the south, Clark’s party met its own crisis. The fullest account comes from Clark himself, who describes a sudden gust driving his canoe under an overhanging log:
the man in the Stern Howard was Caught in between the Canoe and the log and a little hurt after disingaging our selves from this log the canoe was driven imediately under a drift which projected over and a little abov the Water, here the Canoe was very near turning over we with much exertion after takeing out Some of the baggage hauled her out
Ordway, traveling in one of the trailing canoes, records the same accident from outside it. His version is shorter and notably less harrowing:
the canoe Cap* Clark was in got drove to shore by the wind under some tops of trees and was near being filled with water. Cap* Clark fired 2 guns as a signal for help
The detail of the two signal guns appears only in Ordway. Clark, writing from inside the emergency, does not mention firing them — he describes physical struggle with log and drift. Ordway, hearing the signal and responding, naturally foregrounds the sound that summoned him. Clark, for his part, notes that the rescuers “did not get up to our assistance untill we had got Clear,” a wry acknowledgment Ordway omits. Neither narrator names Howard’s injury in the same terms: Clark says he was “a little hurt,” Ordway not at all.
Register, Detail, and the Limits of Single-Narrator History
The day illustrates how decisively the Lewis and Clark journals require cross-reading. Ordway and Clark together reconstruct the canoe accident more completely than either alone — Clark for the interior experience, Ordway for the signal guns and the detail that Willard and Collins, with two deer, had passed the main party by taking the opposite side of an island. Lewis and Gass together reconstruct the horse search, with Lewis providing the framing anxiety of theft and Gass the fieldwork.
Differences in register are equally telling. Lewis alone writes of currants and thrushes; Clark alone records that Howard was pinned; Ordway alone preserves the signal guns; Gass alone notes that the new canoes “answer the purpose very well” — a judgment Lewis echoes in nearly identical phrasing (“answered even beyond our expectations”), suggesting either shared conversation at camp or, as is sometimes the case with Gass, a debt to the captain’s phrasing. Mosquitoes, characteristically, plague both camps and both captains note them.
