One Day, Five Pens, Five Priorities
August 5, 1804 produces an unusually clear demonstration of how differently the expedition’s narrators allocated attention. The same morning storm, the same crooked bend of the Missouri, the same missing man — but each journalist filters the day through a distinct lens.
Lewis devotes nearly his entire entry to two specimens: a bull snake killed on the riverbank and an aquatic bird (almost certainly a tern) he had been trying to procure for weeks. His snake description is forensic —
Length from nose to tail 5 F 2 Inch Circumpherence in largest part 4 1/2 Number of scuta on belly 221 Do. on Tale 53
— and he is careful to record what he cannot personally verify, noting the snake
is vulgarly called the cow or bull snake from a bellowing nois which it is said sometimes to make… tho as to this fact I am unable to attest it never having heard them make that or any other noise myself.
The epistemic caution is characteristic.
Clark, working the same snake into his entry, compresses Lewis’s taxonomy into a single sentence —
a verry large Snake was Killed to day called the Bull Snake, his Colour Some thing like a rattle Snake Something lighter
— and turns instead to the river itself. His geomorphological observation is the day’s most original passage: he describes how sand points deflect current into the opposite bank, how the alluvial bottom
easely melts and Slips, or washies into the river
, and how mud and sand sort themselves downstream. In his second draft of the entry, he predicts the cutoff explicitly:
I Concld. that in two years the main Current of the river will pass through.
He had walked overland and struck the river twelve miles below, only 370 yards from where he started — the same peninsula Gass mentions in identical figures, suggesting Gass either heard Clark’s measurement or saw the captain pace it.
The Storm, the Thunder, and Reed
Floyd and Clark independently record the same meteorological observation, almost word-for-word. Floyd:
I have Remarked that I have not heard much thunder in this Countrey Lightining is Com[mon]
. Clark, parenthetically:
(I have remarked that I have not heard much thunder in this Countrey)
. The phrasing is too close for coincidence; one borrowed from the other, or both from a shared remark made aloud at camp. Given Floyd’s truncated entry — his journal breaks off mid-word, as it often does at page edges — and Clark’s habitual revision, the direction of borrowing is hard to fix, but the overlap is a useful reminder that these journals were not written in isolation.
The day’s human drama is Reed. Whitehouse states it bluntly:
Read deserted from our party.
Clark is more cautious, recording in his first draft only that
Reed the man who went back for his Knife has not yet joined us
, and in his fair copy adding
we have Some reasons to believe he has Deserted
. Lewis says nothing of Reed at all. Gass says nothing. Floyd’s fragment cuts off before he reaches the subject. The desertion will become a formal matter on August 18, when Reed is tried and run the gauntlet, but on August 5 only Whitehouse names it for what it is — a striking instance of the enlisted journalist outpacing the captains in plain speech.
What the Composite Preserves
Read together, the five entries reconstruct a fuller day than any single journal offers: a morning squall (Floyd, Gass), a two-hour delay (Gass), a sixteen-mile run (Whitehouse), a peninsula 370 yards wide and twelve miles around (Clark, Gass), a bull snake dissected on the bank (Lewis, Clark), terns shot and measured (Lewis), grapes of three varieties ripe on the bluffs (Clark), troublesome mosquitoes at camp on the south side (Clark, Whitehouse), and a missing private whose absence is beginning to look permanent (Whitehouse, Clark). The captains’ instinct to record the snake while a man was disappearing into the prairie is, in retrospect, telling about the expedition’s priorities in its first summer: natural history was the mission; discipline was assumed.
