The journals for June 29, 1805 cluster around a single weather event — a violent thunderstorm and hail squall that swept the Great Falls portage — yet each narrator records the day from a different position on the landscape. Lewis is six miles downriver admiring a spring; Clark is sheltering in a ravine with the Charbonneau family as a flash flood nearly drowns them; Gass remains at the main camp; and Whitehouse, traveling with the upriver party, seems unaware of the crisis altogether. The result is an unusually clean test case for how the expedition’s record-keeping fragmented under pressure.
Two Storms, Two Captains
Lewis and Clark experienced the same weather system but from positions roughly seven miles apart, and their prose diverges accordingly. Lewis, caught in the open en route to the great fountain, treats the squall as an inconvenience folded into a day of natural-historical observation:
I sat very composedly for about an hour without sheter and took a copious drenching of rain; after the shower was over I continued my rout to the fountain which I found much as Capt. C; had discribed & think it may well be retained on the list of prodegies of this neighbourhood
The composure is partly literary — Lewis is staging himself as a philosophical traveler — and partly real: his shelter held. Clark’s did not. His entry, written in the same flat ledger voice he typically uses for distances and bearings, becomes one of the most vivid passages in the entire journal corpus once the cloud breaks:
the rain fell like one voley of water falling from the heavens and gave us time only to get out of the way of a torrent of water which was Poreing down the hill in the rivin with emence force tareing every thing before it takeing with it large rocks & mud, I took my gun & Shot pouch in my left hand, and with the right Scrambled up the hill pushing the Interpreters wife (who had her Child in her arms) before me
Clark measures the flood the way he measures everything else — “the water was up to my waste,” “it raised 10 feet deep,” “at least 15 feet water” — but the cumulative effect is terror rendered through quantity. Lewis, returning to camp later, notes only that he was “astonished not to find the party yet arrived” and speculates about muddy wheels. He had not yet learned what had happened to Clark.
What Gass and Whitehouse Did Not See
Patrick Gass, stationed at the main camp working on the iron-frame boat, gives the day three sentences. He registers “another heavy shower of rain” and notes Lewis’s return “drenched with rain,” but Clark’s near-drowning is entirely absent — presumably because Clark had not yet reached camp to tell the story when Gass closed his entry. Gass’s brevity is a useful reminder that the enlisted journals were often written before the captains’ reports filtered down.
Joseph Whitehouse presents a stranger case. His entry describes a full day of travel — “Came 19% ml! this day and Camped on the large plain N.S.” — with rapid currents, cedar islands, and a found goatskin from “Cap! Clarks party.” There is no storm at all. Whitehouse appears to have been with a detachment moving on the river well upstream of the portage cloudburst, and his attention is fixed on the river ecology: otter and beaver “in great abundence,” thick willows, and the rabbit-berry that “the french call graze the buff [graisse de beuf].” His French gloss is the kind of ethnolinguistic detail neither captain bothered to record.
Register and the Question of Sacagawea
Clark is the only narrator to mention Sacagawea on this date, and the absence is telling. Lewis does not know what occurred in the ravine; Gass and Whitehouse, working from camp gossip or simply not present, omit her entirely. Clark’s account — that he pushed “the Interpreters wife (who had her Child in her arms) before me” while Charbonneau, “much Scared and nearly without motion,” failed to help — is uncorroborated by any other journal of the day. Later editors and biographers would lean heavily on this single passage. The cross-narrator silence around it is a useful caution: the expedition’s most cited episodes are sometimes preserved in only one voice, by a single hand, written hours after the event in wet clothes.
