By July 5, 1806, the Corps of Discovery had divided. Meriwether Lewis was leading one party overland toward the Great Falls of the Missouri, while William Clark guided another toward the Three Forks. The four journals from this date — Lewis’s, Clark’s, Patrick Gass’s, and John Ordway’s — record what happened when a single expedition became two, and they expose the editorial habits and observational priorities that distinguish each narrator.
Lewis and Gass: The Surveyor and the Scene-Painter
Lewis’s entry on this date is almost entirely a courses-and-distances log. He proceeds by compass bearing — “N. 75 E. 6½ M.”, “N. 25 E. 12 m.”, “East 6 m. to the entrance of Werner’s Creek 35 yds. wide” — pinning the day to a surveyor’s grid. Yet within that scaffolding he embeds a naturalist’s notes: a gang of antelope of which the does “herd with each other and have their young,” wild horses on Clark’s river, swans on Werner’s Creek, and an old encampment “of 11 lodges of bark and leather.”
Gass, traveling with Lewis’s party, covers the same ground but in radically different prose. Where Lewis tabulates, Gass narrates a day’s travel as a series of tableaux:
about 11 o’clock came to a valley three quarters of a mile wide, all plains, where we halted to dine and to let our horses feed. The hills upon each side are handsomely covered with timber of the fir kind.
Gass’s “handsomely covered” valleys and “large and beautiful” plains aestheticize the country in a way Lewis’s measured bearings do not. Gass also rounds Lewis’s precise “35 yds. wide” Werner’s Creek to a river “about 35 yards wide” — close enough to suggest he was reading or recalling the captain’s measurements, but loose enough to confirm he was writing independently. Notably, Gass omits Lewis’s ethnographic detail about the abandoned lodges and the war-party fires concealed near camp; he records the landscape but not the human traces within it.
Clark and Ordway: A Difficult Ford and a Lost Tomahawk
The contrast on Clark’s side of the divide is even sharper. Clark devotes most of his entry to the morning’s hazardous crossing of the West fork of Clark’s river. He records the search for a ford, the order of march, and the consequences in painstaking detail:
in passing the 6th & last Chanel Colter horse Swam and with Some dificuelty he made the Opposite Shore, Shannon took a different derection from Colter rained his horse up the Stream and passed over very well… unfortunately my trunk & portmantue Containing Sea otter Skins flags Some curiosites & necessary articles in them got wet, also an esortment of Medicine, and my roots.
This is Clark at his most characteristic: command-level prose that tracks logistics, accidents, and material losses. He also reasons inferentially about the country, noting fresh sign of two horses and a fire and concluding, “I prosume that those indians are spies from the Shoshones.”
Ordway, traveling in the same party, compresses the entire crossing into a single clause — “Set out to cross the right fork of the river which we found nearly Swimming” — and devotes equal space to a small human episode Clark mentions only briefly:
Shannon left his tommahawk back where he killed the deer & went back for it. we delayed about 3 hours and proceed on over the hills… Shannon joined us with his tommahawk &C.
Clark notes the lost tomahawk and his order to Shannon to retrieve it, but it is Ordway who frames the day around the three-hour delay it caused. The enlisted-man’s perspective surfaces a detail of expedition life — waiting on a comrade — that the captain treats as a minor logistical note.
Register and What Each Narrator Misses
Cross-reading the four entries reveals consistent register differences. Lewis writes for posterity and for science; his entry could be transposed onto a map. Clark writes as field commander, attentive to risk, materiel, and Indian intelligence. Gass writes for a future reader who wants to picture the country — his published 1807 journal would in fact be the first the public saw. Ordway writes for himself, with a sergeant’s eye for the small frictions of daily march.
Each narrator misses what another captures. Gass omits the ethnographic traces; Ordway omits the soaked sea otter skins; Lewis omits the human texture of the day; Clark omits the courses and bearings that Lewis is compiling a hundred miles away. Only by reading the four journals together does July 5, 1806, emerge whole: two parties, two landscapes, and four ways of writing the West.
