The entries of August 28, 1804, written as the Corps of Discovery camped below the Calumet Bluffs awaiting the return of Sergeant Pryor and the interpreter Dorion from the Yankton Sioux camp, offer an unusually clear demonstration of how the four journal-keepers present that day divided narrative labor. William Clark supplies the day’s documentary backbone; Meriwether Lewis contributes only an administrative order; Patrick Gass condenses; and Joseph Whitehouse drifts to material from earlier in the month entirely.
Clark as Anchor Narrator
Clark produces two versions of the day’s entry, and between them they account for nearly every event the other journalists touch. He notes the stiff southerly breeze, the willow island at two miles, the white bluff of “70 or 80 foot,” the departure of the young Sioux boy who had stayed the night, and — most consequentially — the damage to one of the pirogues. Clark writes:
before we landed the French rund a Snag thro their Perogue, and like to have Sunk, we had her on loaded, from an examonation found that this Perogue was unfit for Service, & Deturmined to Send her back by the Party intended to Send back and take their Perogue, accordingly Changed the loads, Some of the loading was wet
He alone explains the logistical consequence: because the damaged pirogue is unfit for service, its load and crew will be reassigned to the vessel originally designated for the return party. Clark also records a personal detail no one else mentions — that he and Lewis are “much indisposed,” which in his first version he attributes speculatively to “the Homney we Substitute in place of bread, (or Plumbs).” In the second, more polished draft, he removes the dietary speculation and writes simply “owing to Some Cause for which we cannot account,” a small but telling revision toward a more guarded official register.
Gass Condenses; Lewis Withdraws
Patrick Gass, working from his own observation rather than copying Clark, captures the same skeleton of events but strips them to essentials: the fair southeast wind, the breakfast halt, the departure of the “young Indian” to his camp, the cottonwood groves, and the snag. Gass writes that “about 12 one of the periogues run against a snag which broke a hole in it,” and that the party “crossed to the south side to mend the periogue.” Where Clark dwells on reorganization of crews and cargo, Gass treats the incident as a simple repair. Gass also adds a landscape observation Clark omits — that the camp lies “in a wide bottom, in which are large elm and oak trees” — echoing Clark’s secondary remark about unusually heavy timber on the points near the bluff.
Lewis contributes nothing narrative for the date. His sole entry is a general order reorganizing mess duties:
The commanding officers direct that the two messes who form the crews of the perogues shall scelect each one man from their mess for the purpose of cooking and that these cooks as well as those previously appointed to the messes of the Barge crew, shall in future be exempted from mounting guard
The order is jointly signed by Lewis and Clark and reads as a routine military housekeeping document. Read alongside Clark’s account of the damaged pirogue and reshuffled crews, however, Lewis’s order takes on contextual weight: the captains are formalizing crew structure on the same day they are forced to reorganize a vessel.
Whitehouse Off-Date
Joseph Whitehouse’s entry is the anomaly. Although filed under the August 28 sequence, his text concerns the search party sent after the deserter Moses Reed and Lewis’s shooting of a pelican — events belonging to early and mid-August. He writes that “Cap M. Lewis Shot a pillican the Bagg that it carried its drink in contain’d 5 Gallons of water by Measure,” and estimates “better than 5 or 6000 of them flying” past the pelican island. Whitehouse closes the day with the formulaic “Nothing Else happen’d Extraordinary this day,” a phrase that, given the snagged pirogue and the captains’ illness recorded by Clark, suggests his journal at this point may have been reconstructed retrospectively rather than kept current.
Patterns Across the Four
The August 28 cluster shows the characteristic division of the expedition’s documentary record: Clark as the comprehensive logistical chronicler, Gass as a reliable but compressed parallel observer, Lewis as the intermittent author whose contributions on many days are administrative rather than narrative, and Whitehouse as a less reliable diarist whose dating and content sometimes drift. The shared elements — wind, snag, bluff, departing Sioux boy — confirm the day’s events; the divergences reveal how each man understood the purpose of his journal.
