The party ascended the Jefferson on a clear, warm day that turned cold by night. The narrators agree on the day’s structure — early start, deer killed on shore, dragging canoes through shoals, encampment after roughly 22 to 23 miles — but they diverge sharply in what each chose to preserve. Lewis recorded botany. Clark recorded a footprint. The enlisted journalists recorded a panther.
The Panther on the Island
Reuben Field’s kill of a large cat on a midriver island is the day’s signature event in the enlisted journals, and the cross-narrator record exposes how a single specimen gets measured. Ordway gives the length as
“1 feet in length”
— an obvious transcription failure — and notes it was
“of a redish brown, and the first we have killed”
. Whitehouse, who frequently follows Ordway closely, here supplies the figure Ordway’s text lost:
“it was 7½ feet long, & of a redish coulour the turshes [tusks] long the tallants [talons] large but not verry long.”
Whitehouse adds the anatomical detail of tusks and talons that Ordway omits entirely. Clark, more tersely, calls it simply
“a large Panthor on the Shore”
— and notably places the kill on shore rather than on an island. Gass and Lewis do not mention the animal at all. The Whitehouse-Ordway parallelism is otherwise tight on this date (identical phrasing on the deer, the beaver dam, the rapids), but on the panther’s measurements Whitehouse preserves what Ordway garbled, suggesting either independent observation or access to a corrected source.
The Footprint Only Clark Saw
Clark alone records what may be the day’s most consequential observation:
“I saw a fresh track which I took to be an Indian from the Shape of the foot as the toes turned in, I think it probable that this Indian Spied our fires and Came to a Situation to view us from the top of a Small knob on the Lard Side.”
No other narrator mentions the track. Lewis, walking the same shore, writes only of dwarf birch leaves and prickly-pear plains. The omission is striking because the expedition was actively hunting for the Shoshone, and Clark’s inference — that they were being watched from a knob — would have been operationally significant. That Lewis does not echo it suggests Clark made the observation alone on his shore walk and the parties did not fully reconcile their notes that evening.
Four Registers of the Same Valley
The day produces four distinct documentary registers. Lewis writes the longest entry and converts it almost entirely into a botanical inventory — narrow-leafed cottonwood, small willow, honeysuckle, currant, serviceberry, gooseberry, and a dwarf birch he describes carefully:
“the leaf which is oval finely, indented, small and of a deep green colour. the stem is simple ascending and branching, and seldom rises higher than 10 or 12 feet.”
He also notices a peculiarity of the river bottoms —
“formed into meriads of deep holes as if rooted up by hogs”
— that no other narrator registers, though Ordway and Whitehouse were walking the same ground.
Ordway’s register is hydrological and ethnographic. He alone describes the beaver dam at a spring’s mouth in detail (
“the water falls over the dam in the River ab° 4 feet”
), tastes the spring water and finds it cold, and reads the burned prairies as the work of
“the natives, as appears”
some six months earlier. Whitehouse repeats the burn observation but guesses
“last fall”
— a small disagreement on timing between two narrators whose entries are otherwise nearly identical.
Gass writes the shortest entry and is the only narrator to record the gastronomic moment:
“Currants and service berries are in abundance along this valley, and we regaled ourselves with some of the best I had ever seen.”
Where Lewis catalogues the same bushes as botanical specimens, Gass eats them. Gass also alone notes the cold night.
Clark’s entry, finally, is the field commander’s: river conditions, the labor of hauling canoes over shoals, two bold tributaries from snowmelt, game inventory (deer, elk, antelope, bear, beaver, otter, trout, geese, ducks, curlews), and the human track. He closes the day having decided nothing; Lewis closes his by resolving to examine the next morning whether the river forks above. That resolution would matter — the Three Forks question was nearly behind them, but the Beaverhead-Big Hole-Jefferson decision was just ahead.
