The entries for August 8, 1804 record one of the expedition’s most vivid wildlife encounters: a sandbar above the mouth of the Little Sioux River covered with American white pelicans. All three narrators — Patrick Gass, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis — note the event, but the contrast in how each handles it reveals as much about the writers as about the birds. The same scene becomes, by turns, a logistical curiosity, a geographic waypoint, and a formal scientific description.
Three Registers, One Sandbar
Gass, characteristically terse, compresses the day into a handful of clauses. He notes that Clark went hunting and killed an elk, that one of the men killed a pelican, and that Lewis killed another — “very large.” His single memorable detail is a practical experiment:
In the bag under the bill and neck of the pelican, which Captain Lewis killed, we put five gallons of water.
This is the sergeant’s eye: a measurement that converts a strange bird into a familiar unit. Where Lewis will spend paragraphs on anatomy, Gass tests capacity. The five-gallon figure is a detail neither captain records, and it survives only because Gass thought a soldier’s measure worth preserving.
Clark, writing in two overlapping drafts, situates the pelicans within the day’s geography. He carefully transcribes the Sioux name for the Little Sioux River — Ed-Neah Wau-de-pon, or Stone River — and devotes most of his entry to the river’s course, its connection to Lake Despree, and its relation to the Des Moines and the Maha villages. The pelicans appear almost as an afterthought:
many hundreds of Pelicans on this Island we call it Pelican Isld. Cap Lewis Killed one
Clark’s field draft adds a striking detail Gass omits and Lewis treats only briefly: the birds, startled, “left 3 fish on the” sandbar (the sentence breaks off mid-thought). Clark also concedes a humbling moment of his own — he fired four times at an elk and missed, blaming both the small ball and the mosquitoes that, “with the assistance of a bush I could not Keep them out of my eyes.” This kind of self-deprecating field note rarely survives in Lewis’s more polished prose.
Lewis the Naturalist
Lewis’s entry is of an entirely different order. He builds the encounter as a narrative of discovery, beginning with a mystery:
I saw a great number of feathers floating down the river those feathers had a very extraordinary appearance as they appeared in such quantities as to cover pretty generally sixty or seventy yards of the breadth of the river. for three miles after I saw those feathers continuing to run in that manner, we did not percieve from whence they came
The resolution — a flock so vast it “apeared to cover several acres of ground” — is delivered with deliberate dramatic timing. Lewis then pivots into formal natural history, organizing his observations under headings: Habits, Measure, and Discription of Colour &c. He gives a wing-tip-to-wing-tip span of nine feet four inches, describes the joints of the wing in sequence, and begins a careful account of the gular pouch — the same anatomical feature Gass had used as a water container. Lewis also infers the seasonal cycle, deducing from a juvenile killed that morning that the flock was returning south after breeding.
What Each Narrator Notices
The cross-narrator pattern is instructive. Gass and Clark both record that Lewis killed a pelican, but only Gass preserves the five-gallon measurement and only Clark preserves the abandoned fish on the sand. Lewis himself mentions the abandoned fish — “several small fish of about eight inches in length, none of which I had seen before” — suggesting Clark may have heard the detail directly from him, or independently observed it. Neither captain records Gass’s water test, which raises the likelihood that the experiment was conducted later in camp, perhaps among the enlisted men, and never reported to the officers in a form they thought worth journalizing.
The river of floating feathers is Lewis’s alone. Clark, traveling on shore with a hunter, missed the moment entirely; Gass, presumably aboard the boat, either did not see it or did not find it worth recording. It is a reminder that even on a single day, with the party traveling within sight of one another, the surviving record is a composite — built from what each man chose, or was positioned, to see.
