May 15, 1805 was a recovery day. The previous afternoon’s accident with the white pirogue — when a sudden squall nearly capsized the boat carrying the expedition’s instruments, medicines, and papers — had left the corps with sodden cargo and an urgent need for sun. They got little. All five narrators describe the same frustrated effort to dry goods under an uncooperative sky, and the entries cluster so tightly that the small divergences become the interesting material.
The Same Day, Five Times
Lewis and Clark both inventory what was wet. Clark catalogs it most fully:
Our medisons, Instruments, merchandize, Clothes, provisions &c. &c. which was nearly all wet we had put out to air and dry.
Lewis is more specific about cause, naming the white perogue as the source of the soaking, and frames the morning around a
slight shower of rain
that delayed the spreading. Gass, characteristically terse, gives only the conclusion — the day was
cloudy and unfavourable for the purpose, and some rain fell.
Ordway and Whitehouse track each other almost line for line, as they often do. Both record the eleven o’clock shower (Whitehouse times its duration at
about one hour
), both note the hunters’ return toward evening, and both produce identical game tallies: one buffalo, seven deer, four beaver. The phrasing in Whitehouse —
opened them but Soon had to cover them again for a Shower of rain… then we opened them again
— adds a small physical detail Ordway omits, the repeated opening and covering of the bundles. It is the kind of camp-level texture the sergeants and privates preserve more reliably than the captains.
A Discrepancy in the Hunt
The captains and the enlisted men disagree on what the hunters brought back. Lewis writes that they
killed several deer, and saw three bear one of which they wounded.
Clark echoes this almost verbatim:
our hunters killed Several deer &c. and Saw three Bear one of which they wounded.
Neither captain mentions the buffalo or the four beaver that Ordway and Whitehouse record. The enlisted men, conversely, omit the three bear entirely.
This is not contradiction so much as different bookkeeping. The captains were noting the encounter that mattered — bears, which the corps was already learning to fear — while the sergeants were tallying the meat and pelts that fed and clothed the camp. Read together, the two accounts give a fuller hunting day than either alone: deer, buffalo, beaver in hand, and three grizzlies sighted with one wounded and lost.
Clark’s Wider Eye
The most striking divergence is Clark’s closing observation, which has no parallel in any of the other four entries:
We see Buffalow on the banks dead, others floating down dead, and others mired every day, those buffalow either drown in Swiming the river or brake thro the ice
None of the other narrators mention this. Lewis, Gass, Ordway, and Whitehouse are all looking at the camp — at wet bales, at cloud cover, at returning hunters. Clark is looking at the river. His note is also the only naturalist observation of the day: a hypothesis about cause (drowning while swimming, or breaking through late ice), grounded in repeated sightings (
every day
). It is a reminder that even on a stationary, uneventful day, Clark continued accumulating the kind of environmental data that the journals as a whole depend on.
The cross-narrator record for May 15 thus does what these comparisons often do: it confirms the basic facts through redundancy, exposes the sergeants’ camp-level granularity against the captains’ interpretive framing, and isolates the one observation — Clark’s drifting buffalo carcasses — that would otherwise have been lost.
