The expedition on June 26, 1805 occupies two camps separated by eighteen miles of prickly-pear plain. Lewis writes from the upper camp at the head of the portage, preparing the iron-frame boat; Clark writes from the lower camp, supervising the second relay of baggage. Gass — who spent the day with Shields searching the opposite shore for timber — supplies an enlisted-man’s view of the upper camp’s activity. Ordway and Whitehouse, whose surviving manuscript pages for this date have slipped forward into late July entries, contribute nothing to June 26 itself; their inclusion in the day’s roster is an artifact of misaligned transcription.
Two Camps, Two Ledgers
Clark’s entry is the quartermaster’s document. He lists what moved and what stayed:
Parched meal Pork Powder Lead axes, Tools Bisquit, P. Soup & Some Merchendize & Clothes
went forward with the party, while a cache was assembled from
____ Kegs of Pork, 1/2 a Keg of flour, 2 blunderbuts, ____ Caterrages a few Small lumbersom articles Capt Lewiss Desk and Some books & Small articles in it
The blank spaces where quantities should appear suggest Clark intended to fill them later and never did. He also notes Sergeant Pryor dosed with salts, Charbonneau rendering buffalo tallow into three kegs, and the wind shifting east — a fair sailing wind for the wheeled canoes crossing the plains.
Lewis records the same tallow-rendering and the same cache contents, but from the receiving end and with fuller detail: the desk contained
my specimens of plants minerals &c. collected from fort Mandan to that place
and the swivel gun was buried separately
under the rocks a little above the camp near the river
The two captains’ entries thus interlock — Clark itemizes what he packed, Lewis itemizes what he expects to lose if the cache is ever compromised.
The Penknife Bleeding
The day’s most arresting episode is medical. Lewis identifies the patient by name:
Whitehouse one of them much heated and fortiegued on his arrivall dank a very hearty draught of water and was taken almost instanly extreemly ill. his pulse were very full and I therefore bled him plentifully from which he felt great relief. I had no other instrument with which to perform this opperation but my pen knife, however it answered very well.
Gass corroborates the event but anonymizes the victim and misattributes the instrument’s scarcity:
One man fell very sick and Captain Lewis had to bleed him with a penknife, having no other instrument at this camp.
Gass’s phrasing — “at this camp” — implies the medical chest was below with Clark; Lewis’s phrasing implies the penknife was simply what came to hand. Neither captain mentions that the bled man is the same Joseph Whitehouse whose journal would normally testify here. His silence on his own near-collapse is, by accident of textual displacement, total.
What Gass Preserves Alone
Gass alone records the day’s measurements. He reports that Clark
measured the length of this portage accurately and found it to be 18 miles
and itemizes the falls:
The first great pitch 98 feet, the second 19 feet, the third 47 feet 8 inches, the fourth 26 feet; and a number of small pitches, amounting altogether to 362 feet g inches.
Neither captain enters these figures under June 26 — Clark’s survey work was done earlier and Lewis is preoccupied with the boat. Gass, writing retrospectively and compressing several days of measurement into one entry, becomes the only narrator on this date to fix the portage’s vertical scale. He also confirms the buffalo kill — seven animals — that Lewis mentions in passing.
The cross-narrator record for June 26 is therefore unusually lopsided: two captains writing complementary halves of a logistical day, one sergeant supplying numbers and a witnessed medical emergency, and two enlisted journalists effectively absent. The day’s signature image — a captain opening a vein with a pocket knife to revive an overheated private who would otherwise be writing about it — survives only because Lewis bothered to record what his patient could not.
