The June 14, 1805 record is unusual in the degree to which it bifurcates: Lewis is alone on foot above the Great Falls, encountering one cataract after another, while Clark, Ordway, Gass, and Whitehouse are ten miles downstream wrestling canoes through rapid current. The two halves of the journal record barely overlap — yet read together they capture both the expedition’s most lyrical day of discovery and one of its grimmer days of attrition.
Lewis Alone Above the Falls
Lewis’s entry is by far the longest and most literary of the day. Having dispatched Joseph Fields downstream with a letter for Clark, he sets a man to building a meat scaffold and then, almost casually, decides to walk a few miles upriver before dinner. What follows is one of the great descriptive passages of the journals. He encounters first a 19-foot pitch he names Crooked Falls:
this pitch which I called the crooked falls occupys about three fourths of the width of the river, commencing on the South side, extends obliquly upwards about 150 yds. then forming an accute angle extends downwards nearly to the commencement of four small Islands
Then, hearing a “tremendious roaring” above, he pushes on and discovers the cascade now called Rainbow Falls:
a cascade of about fifty feet perpendicular streching at rightangles across the river from side to side to the distance of at least a quarter of a mile. here the river pitches over a shelving rock, with an edge as regular and as streight as if formed by art, without a nich or brake in it
Lewis explicitly compares the two falls — the Great Falls he had described the previous day and this new one — and cannot decide “on which of those two great cataracts to bestoe the palm.” Notably, none of the other four narrators record any of this geography. They know only what Fields tells them: the falls are about 20 miles ahead, and Lewis has gone on to find a portage route.
The Sick Boat Below
The downstream party’s entries form a tight cluster, with Ordway and Whitehouse running nearly parallel — the documented Whitehouse-from-Ordway pattern is plainly visible. Both report “verry high bluffs on each Side” and “Several Islands covered with cotton timber,” both note the current “verry rapid all day,” and both close with the formulaic “10 miles to day” and a camp on the larboard side. Whitehouse, however, adds details Ordway omits: that he himself is “verry sick,” and a striking observation:
we Saw a nomber of dead buffalow floating down the River which we expect was killed in the falls.
This is the kind of inferential note that distinguishes Whitehouse at his best — connecting an observed phenomenon (drifting carcasses) to an unseen cause (the falls upstream he has not yet seen).
Clark’s entry is the medical ledger of the day. Where Ordway notes vaguely that “one of the men [has] a light feaver,” Clark itemizes the casualty list: Sacagawea “complaining all night & excessively bad this morning her case is Somewhat dangerous,” two men with toothache, two with tumors (boils or abscesses), one man with a tumor and slight fever. Gass, characteristically terse, mentions none of this. Gass also compresses the Fields rendezvous to a single sentence — “about 2 one of Captain Lewis’s men met us” — while Whitehouse times it at “about 4 oC. P. M.” and Clark at “4 oClock this evening.” The one-hour discrepancy between Gass and the others is the kind of small inconsistency that recurs throughout the journals.
What the Cross-Record Reveals
Three things emerge only when the entries are read against each other. First, Clark’s anxiety about Sacagawea is conspicuously absent from the enlisted men’s journals — either they did not know her condition was grave, or they did not consider it worth recording. Second, the expedition’s discovery of what is now a chain of five distinct falls happens in installments: Lewis sees the lowest on June 13, Crooked Falls and Rainbow Falls on June 14, and the chain is not fully mapped for several more days. The downstream party will not see any of this geography until they arrive. Third, Clark’s entry quietly performs a confirmation that matters strategically: Lewis’s letter, summarized by Clark, reports that “the Eagles nest which they describe is there” — the Hidatsa landmark — and “from those Signs he is Convinced of this being the river the Indians call the Missouri.” The expedition’s earlier Marias River debate is, in Clark’s secondhand telling, now formally closed.
