The journals of May 10, 1805 capture the Corps of Discovery wind-bound on the Missouri somewhere in present-day Montana, having advanced only a short distance from their morning launch before squalls forced them ashore. Yet what looks like a lost day in the keelboat’s progress becomes, across four narrators, a study in how rank, literacy, and curiosity shape the recording of a single event.
The Dog That Crossed the River
The most striking convergence among the captains is their alarm at a stray dog. Lewis writes that hunters were dispatched not from hunger but
to discover the Indians whome we had reasons to believe were in the neighbourhood, from the circumstance of one of their dogs comeing to us this morning shortly after we landed.
Clark records the same incident in nearly parallel construction:
Soon after we landed a Dog came to us from the opposit Side, which induced a belief that we had not passd. the Assinniboin Indians.
The verbal echo — “induced a belief” in Clark, “induced” reasoning in Lewis — suggests the captains conferred before writing, or that one consulted the other’s draft. Lewis adds the editorial judgment that the Assiniboine are “a vicious illy disposed nation,” a characterization Clark omits, perhaps reflecting Lewis’s habit of folding ethnographic opinion into operational notes.
Remarkably, neither enlisted journalist mentions the dog at all. Ordway, writing for May 10, is in fact a day ahead of the captains in his narrative — describing the passage of Big Dry River and the camp at Werner’s (Warner’s) Creek, events the captains log on May 9. Whitehouse, by contrast, tracks the captains’ May 10 closely, noting the wind, the squalls, the hunt, and the arms inspection, but says nothing of the visiting dog or the Assiniboine anxiety it provoked. The intelligence concern, it seems, stayed at the officers’ fire.
Counting the Same Game Differently
The day’s hunting tally offers a useful check on cross-narrator reliability. Lewis reports
two Mule deer, one common fallow or longtailed deer, 2 Buffaloe and 5 beaver, and saw several deer of the Mule kind of immence size, and also three of the Bighorned anamals.
Clark’s enumeration is nearly identical — “Three mule deer, two Buffalow & 5 beaver killed, 3 of the mountain ram Seen” — though he collapses Lewis’s mule-and-fallow distinction into three mule deer. Whitehouse, working from a different vantage, tallies “1 fat buffaloe 4 beaver, and 3 Deer” and adds that the men “Saw Some mooce Deer which was much larger than the common deer.” His “mooce Deer” is plainly the same animal Lewis devotes paragraphs to as the mule deer; the enlisted man reaches for a familiar name where the captain reaches for taxonomy.
Whitehouse also preserves a small domestic detail the captains skip entirely: “one of the men caught a nomber of fish.” These are the textures — fishing, clubbing tame game out of the path, the sociable economy of camp — that the enlisted journals consistently supply where the captains’ attention is fixed on threat assessment and natural history.
Lewis the Naturalist, Alone
The day’s most distinctive passage belongs to Lewis alone. Triggered by the hunters’ kill, he launches into an extended comparative anatomy of the mule deer versus the common (white-tailed) deer — measuring ears (“eleven inches long and 3½ in width”), describing winter wool “intermixed with the hair and lying next to the skin as the Antelope has,” and contrasting the species’ flight behavior:
when they are met with in the woodlands or river bottoms and are pursued, they invariably run to the hills or open country as the Elk do. the contrary happens with the common deer.
Lewis also reads the species distribution as terrain prophecy: “from the appearance of the Mule deer and the bighorned anamals we beleive ourselves fast approaching a hilly or mountainous country.” Clark, who saw the same carcasses, records only the count. Ordway and Whitehouse, who likely handled the meat, register no anatomical interest whatever. The mule deer essay is a reminder that on any given day the expedition’s scientific output depended almost entirely on whether Lewis chose to write at length — and that the enlisted journals, valuable as they are for routine and morale, cannot substitute for his absences.
A Note on Ordway’s Calendar
Researchers consulting Ordway for May 10 should note the one-day offset evident here: his entry under this date describes the Big Dry River and Werner’s Creek camp the captains place on May 9. Such drift is common in the sergeants’ journals and is best resolved by triangulating against Lewis and Clark’s dated headings rather than treating Ordway’s date-line as authoritative.
